


Threadcutter

by CourierNew



Category: Hollow Knight (Video Games)
Genre: Gen, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-16
Updated: 2020-09-20
Packaged: 2021-03-05 02:55:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 61,710
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25297246
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CourierNew/pseuds/CourierNew
Summary: "Death is not permitted here."The Radiance perishes and Hallownest falls silent. The infection of light spares few in its wake, turning the kingdom into a tomb filled with the bodies of the formerly afflicted. After some time spent recovering in Dirtmouth, Hornet chooses to depart the only home she's ever known. She descends one final time in search of survivors who may also wish to leave, thinking nothing of her sacrificed siblings, though she carries a pair of mismatched horns underneath her cloak.But something else stirs beneath her feet, ancient and full of grief, and Hornet's task proves far more treacherous than she had believed, her path littered with old gods and new threats. As she delves into the darkest reaches of Hallownest, haunted with visions of the life spent there, the orphaned princess learns that she must reckon with all she has lost, before the kingdom and its secrets destroy whatever she has left.
Comments: 123
Kudos: 261





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Will it rain? Will it snow? Will it pass? I don't know.  
> \- _Pathologic_
> 
> Love is a hole in the heart.  
> \- Ben Hecht

The City of Tears never truly died.

There were many maps of Hallownest, this fantastical warren of caverns that lay deep beneath the withered earth, and though they varied in purpose and scope, they all failed to account for some things. There were details in this place too fine for even the most meticulous cartographer, seams and veins within its walls that had been opened up by the groaning, ever-shifting earth. These cracks housed a lifeless kingdom of their own, colonies of trickling moisture – the rivulets of rainfall that would pass from the surface into the Crossroads and beyond, the aggregations of dew from Greenpath and the Queen’s Gardens – and through some trick of geology, much of it found its way to the Blue Lake. The lake’s native algae granted its waters the brilliant, almost searing glow of its namesake; it was fed by half the kingdom, and from there it spilled through countless more unseen capillaries to the city below. Some of its inhabitants speculated that the lake’s precipitation is what tinted the City of Tears’ gloom – blue as sleep, blue as mourning.

The Pale King’s decrees were seldom questioned, but in better days, many of his subjects had quietly wondered why he’d chosen to build his capital here. It was majestic, yes, its innumerable ornate towers stabbing upward like the decorated fingers of some buried giant, every wrought-iron fencepost a work of art, all of it carefully guarded against the rust that the rain would bring, and if the poorer sections of the city flooded up to one’s ankles every time a new seam opened up overhead, well, such was progress. Majestic, they reminded themselves. But on some nights, which were no different from the days, they yearned for a bit of light.

There were debates. Practical-minded bugs cited the ever-present source of water for drinking and washing, the advancements in architecture that such an environment demanded. The King’s courtiers spoke in rapturous tones, claiming that the city’s (a significant pause here) some might say _dreariness_ was just a reminder that the King was all the light they would ever need. Then there were the ones who saw the capital and the kingdom it represented as the staking of a claim, an act of defiance – a place that would never be undone no matter how nature struggled against it. An eternal city, for an eternal kingdom.

And the ones who never spoke at all looked askance and silently added: _A tribute to stasis._ To them, the City of Tears in all its grandeur betrayed something unwholesome about the Wyrm. A dedication to the changeless that bordered on mania.

Then the other light had come, and with it a whole new kind of stasis – shambling and moaning, eyes that wandered like candle-flames across broken windows, as the city’s gutters buckled and strained under their growing decrepitude. The King had departed, and that invading light spilled across everything and filled everyone to bursting, and the witless paths they walked trailed stains across the city’s blue.

That light, too, had gone out.

From somewhere above emitted a harridan screech that rushed through the caverns like a malevolent ghost and made the Blue Lake’s surface ripple, and the orange light that flooded the eyes of the afflicted went dark all at once. In the far corners of Hallownest, some lesser creatures rose again after a time, drunkenly, mandibles clacking and wings buzzing as if waterlogged, but for all others the infection left nothing behind. The former citizens collapsed like unstrung puppets and did not rise again. Rain spilled around their masks, pooled in the armor of the fallen guardsmen. In time, one could imagine them becoming akin to the sculptures which still dotted this place, piles of the dead cocooned in lime.

The city, undaunted by this sudden stillness, carried on. Water continued to flow through creaking gutters and pitted eaves, its circulation providing a facsimile of life. There was no other movement; no furtive survivors opened their doors with a shaking hand, peering up at the spires overhead as if for assurance that the plague had ended. With precious few exceptions, it had taken all of them long ago.

But had anyone still been alive to bear witness, huddled on the upper floors in apartments barricaded against the dreaming dead, then someone might have seen it. After a time, a shadow crawled on distant towers, long and sinuous, flowing across the architecture’s surface like rainwater itself. It helixed down to the city’s streets and scuttled serpentine through the soaked hillocks of the fallen. It stopped, belly to the earth, its carapace so black it barely seemed solid, like a slashmark in the fabric of space. Before it was a dead bug of the upper caste, thin and pale as an egg, its scarlet finery striated with mold.

The shadow reached out with numerous hands, spindly and six-fingered and dark as its shell. Those hands clasped the corpse, rose it up, and their owner rose with it, that slender shape enfolding the body. It wept. It remained like that for a long while, the sound smothered by the unending rain.

* * *

The map was large enough to cover the tabletop. Its lines were rough but depicted the kingdom with impressive detail, its chambers color-coded by region with a spectrum of different inks, smaller doodles depicting settlements or landmarks of note. Inconspicuous pins dotted the paper’s surface like some strange pox, many of their designs inscrutable. The map’s edges were singed, with King’s Peak and part of Greenpath obliterated by char, and elsewhere it was stained by a tarry fluid that had obscured some of its details and made unfurling it a painstakingly delicate task. All attempts to eliminate these stains had failed, and so it was highly unlikely that the map could ever be closed again without staying that way.

This mattered little to Hornet. She had trekked through the whole of Hallownest so many times over the long years (decades? time had become indistinct here, it passed like water) that she could likely navigate most of it with her eyes closed, not that she was foolhardy enough to try. There were other findings in this map that she’d wished to study, and had spent several days doing so. The task had technically been finished before the end of the first day, but she’d felt the need to re-check her work.

She bent over the map yet again, her horns’ shadows shivering in the glow of the lumafly lantern overhead. She traced its pathways with a finger. From here, to the Crossroads, and then to the City of Tears. Then the gardens, much as she would prefer to avoid them, and from there…well. She would see how sentimental she was feeling then.

There was a knock at the door.

“It’s open,” she said, without looking up.

Her visitor entered, with difficulty, being so tall that in order to get through the doorway they had to bow like an obsequious butler. For a moment the sound of clanging steel and high-pitched but surprisingly robust shouting could be heard, and then Iselda swung the door shut again and all was silent. She leaned against the wall, arms folded.

“Keeping well?” she asked.

“As can be expected,” Hornet answered.

Hornet had not planned to acquaint herself with this little community. Her calling was to rid Hallownest of anything that might have disturbed its fragile seals, and to the best of her knowledge, Dirtmouth had never contained anything of the sort. She’d left the Temple of the Black Egg with her new mementoes and fully intended to take refuge somewhere deeper in the caverns. But her legs had failed her – a moment of exhaustion, nothing serious – and the world had gone dark, and then she’d found herself resting in one of the abandoned huts, with a curious and concerned huddle of bugs in the grounds beyond. At the sound of the death-shrieks echoing from within the temple, Iselda and the merchant Sly had been struck by a sudden surge of courage, grabbing their weapons (the former with a halberd, the latter with a nail, both of them substantially larger than their owners) and stormed the Crossroads only to find it lightless and littered with the dead. They’d located her outside the temple and brought her topside, and while their assistance hadn’t been necessary, Hornet was still obligated to explain what had occurred in there. She’d told them everything – including, out of what she could only assume was some fleeting delirium, about her own heritage. Most of them had taken it in stride, which she found even stranger.

The infection was banished, the hideous unlife that had pervaded Hallownest was no more, and the strange attraction it held for its visitors had also seemed to abate for the time being. The refugees of Dirtmouth adjusted their lives accordingly. Iselda and her mapmaker husband prepared to leave, the latter having charted the land beneath to his satisfaction. Sly appeared intent on staying and plying his wares to a whole new generation of eager treasure-hunters, but his quickly-truncated rescue mission had lit a fire in him; several days afterward, he’d stomped empty-handed back into the ruined kingdom and returned dragging three burly bugs and Hallownest’s fabled Nailsmith in tow. Hornet knew of Sly, had heard whispered legends of the Nailsage, and while she’d never paid a visit to his three scattered apprentices, she still recognized them on one of her rare trips outside the hut. But that didn’t explain the smith’s presence, or why one of the apprentices was wearing a paint-stained smock, or why the other two had emerged from the well with a distinctly guilty, hangdog air. She kept to her own business, and Sheo took up his crafts while Sly mercilessly drilled Oro and Mato every day thereafter. Dirtmouth had a little forge of its own, and smoke had been puffing out its chimney for some time.

Hornet stayed apart from them all, ran her own errands. She rested and then made brief sojourns to the Crossroads to restock the village’s food supply, hunting tiktiks still sluggish from the infection’s banishment. When she was alone, she studied the map, in preparation for her final expedition throughout the kingdom.

“I take it my provisions were satisfactory?” Hornet asked.

“They were just fine. I should know, as I’m perfectly capable of hunting myself.” Iselda glanced at the map. “Is today the day?”

“Yes. Your husband’s ready to leave?”

“He’s still studying his maps. Charting a course through the wilds, he says. Except I know full well that he could do that in a matter of hours, not days. He seems intent on letting you come along with us.”

Hornet still didn’t look up. “He needn’t worry about me.”

“Corny’s a worrier. It’s part of his charm.” Iselda sighed. “I’m fully open to the idea, of course. We can’t begin to repay the debt we owe you. Adding you to our little party would be a trifle. But so long as you linger here…”

Hornet finally stepped away from the table. Her needle glinted in the room’s far corner and she picked it up, ran a thumb across its silky surface.

“I don’t intend to stay indefinitely. But nor do I wish to delay you all.” She slung the needle over her back. “It may still be some time before I settle on a destination.”

“If it’s a destination you’re after, then I can scarcely imagine a better traveling companion than a cartographer. Just keep the offer in mind as you undergo your search down there. Are you going to comb the whole kingdom?”

“That would take weeks. I’ve already set my course.” She gestured to the map. “I shouldn’t be more than a few days at most. Any longer than that, I suggest you leave without me.”

Iselda tilted her head, the lantern-light casting worried shadows in the hollows of her face. “No one else has arrived since Sly dragged those fellows out of the well. I can’t help but think that if there were any survivors, they’d have emerged by now. Excepting stubborn hanger-ons like that old stag.”

“There’s a few down there who are stubborner yet. Has anyone else left the village?”

“Only that blabbering dolt of a ‘knight.’” Iselda’s expression turned pained; she’d dropped the quotemarks around the word like a pair of tongs. “Which comes as a relief, frankly. He did liven up the place, but if I’d had to endure his prattle much longer then I may well have killed him myself.”

“Would your husband approve?”

“Mm, perhaps not. Maimed him, then. A happy marriage is built on compromise.”

Hornet was grateful that the poor light here concealed her amusement. She’d striven not to grow attached to any of these people, but Iselda made it difficult – she was whip-smart, unafraid of bothering her, and even in her current relaxed pose she had the coiled posture of a seasoned warrior. Hornet had no need of traveling companions, but there could certainly be worse candidates.

“I’m off.” She made for the doorway. “Let Cornifer know he’s welcome to replicate that map if he wishes. I’ve memorized the necessary parts of it.”

She stepped outside without waiting for a response.

Dirtmouth was a dismal place even in the morning-light; the sky was overcast and the color of tin, and only illuminated the score of empty huts scattered like pustules across the earth. In better days it may have been cozier, but Hornet wouldn’t know, had seldom ventured beyond Deepnest until it became clear that all was lost. Even then, she doubted it. This place was intended to be a way-station, deliberately homely, so as to better tempt its inhabitants into the beautiful kingdom below.

In the distance, nails flashed and clanged as Oro and Mato continued their drills beside the rigid speck of Sly. Hornet observed their sparring for a moment or two and thought they looked competent enough, but the Nailsage evidently didn’t agree, having shouted himself hoarse at the two of them for the better part of a week. On the path up to the well, Sheo had set up his easel, painting the hulk of Crystal Peak beyond. The old Elderbug was with him, watching with polite interest. Hornet tried to avoid their attention, but her footsteps crunched the grit underfoot and the old bug’s hearing was surprisingly sharp. He turned and almost fell to his knees at the sight of her.

“Princess!” he said. “How does the day find you?”

“Adequate. And kindly do not call me that again.”

“Ah. Yes.” He shrank back. “Pardon me. I forget myself.”

She was an orphan of two kingdoms, spawn of Beast and Wyrm. When this had been revealed to Dirtmouth, the Elderbug (who had introduced himself as such; if he had any other name it was either concealed or lost) had been the only one who’d reacted with awe and respect. For this reason, Hornet had instantly borne him a strong dislike that he absolutely did not deserve. But she was not royalty, the circumstances of her birth notwithstanding. The very suggestion rankled her.

Like Sly, he wished to stay within Hallownest, but she could at least sympathize with his reasons for doing so. It was the kingdom’s departing curse that troubled him – the warning posted at its borders that claimed any who retreated from the Wyrm’s light would lose the mind it granted. An act of bitter jealousy, she’d always thought, but never dared to test whether it existed, or ever had existed, or how much it would take from you if it did. She knew of no one who’d left this place and then returned.

Sheo kept painting, indifferent to Hornet’s ruminations or the chilly atmosphere between her and his new audience. He was dabbing purple on the landscape, flashes of crystal within the mountain’s gloom.

“Come see, milady,” he said. “What is your opinion?”

She stared at the canvas as though trying to decide if it was edible. “I know little of art.”

“Knowledge is not needed! Only emotion. How would you describe this, in a word?”

The painted mountain seemed darker than its subject, the shadows rendering its outline misshapen, and at its base he’d drawn the cemetery in miniature with its stones like decaying teeth. The gloom it portrayed was totally at odds with the painter’s chipper attitude.

“It appears melancholy,” she said at last.

Sheo nodded, slowly, as if he’d regretted asking. “Too true. This very land is suffused with melancholy. I wonder, would it be more laudable to defy that sadness, or to make use of it?”

This bit of philosophy was shattered by Sly’s tinny roar, enough to make even Hornet wince:

_“Clumsy! Shameful! Is that a nail you wield, or a battle-axe?! Again, and properly this time!”_

“Quite a harsh master,” the Elderbug remarked, after the echo had died away. “Does he resent you for not joining them?”

“Not at all,” said Sheo. He mixed more paint. “I chose another calling, as did he. I suppose it’s fortunate I never became a merchant.”

_“Barely adequate! Again!”_

“I’ve seen little of your companion since his arrival,” said the Elderbug.

“Ah, well, that’s another matter. A commission of sorts. Confidential.” He glanced back at Hornet, who jerked guiltily to attention; she’d been entranced by the painting. “You’re off to try and add to our number, milady?”

“That’s my intent. And I’ve tarried too long already.” She nodded to each of them in turn. “Good day to you.”

The Elderbug stepped forward. “Prin- Hornet, please wait. Won’t you consider staying? The kingdom is not in such a dismal state and it’s your home as much as anyone’s. The presence of one such as yourself…”

“Would be meaningless. My task is done, my vigil ended, and any newcomers to this place would neither know nor care of my heritage. It’s time to depart.”

“Yes. Of course, forgive my impertinence.” He clutched at something beneath his cloak. “But I will tell your story to all who arrive. And that of the little one.”

She glimpsed it then – a small belljar held under the Elderbug’s arm like a talisman, bearing a dried white flower. For a moment her hand reached to something beneath her own cloak, and then stopped, and a wicked splinter of meanness compelled her to speak.

“It requires no memorial, in word or deed,” she said coolly. “I left its remains in the Temple of the Black Egg. A fitting internment, I believed. Though if you would prefer to create a shrine in its honor, you’re welcome to go down there and fetch it yourself.”

The Elderbug murmured something indistinct. Sheo’s paintbrush had stopped; Hornet could feel his gaze burning through the side of her head. She stopped short, considered apologizing, and elected instead to walk off and grip the well’s chain and slide down into its depths.

When she reached the bottom and the chain’s clinking ceased, the silence of the Crossroads pressed against her like weight. Any other time, these caves would be filled with the shambling, moaning husks and the buzz of gruzzers and aphids driven hostile by that fever-light, to say nothing of the grotesque cacophony of pulsating infection that had filled the place just after the first of the temple’s seals had broken. Now it was quiet as a mausoleum, save for the distant drip of water or the tentative scuttle of lesser bugs who’d regained wits enough to move. It made her feel like a stranger in her own domain.

She pressed on nevertheless, heading east. The caves narrowed, descended, opened again, and there it was – the Temple of the Black Egg, the shine of the lanterns within still persisting, smothering the blackness at its heart.

Hornet stopped at its threshold. She tilted her head as if expecting a voice. None came, of course, and there was no point at all in returning there. In time, this place would serve as a curiosity to treasure hunters or bold archaeologists, and the refuse within could be kicked aside or studied as they pleased.

Her hands moved of their own volition. They twitched aside her cloak and reached within. She’d always carried a number of tools strapped to her spindly body, tied to her with thread conjured by Soul – her needle, her caltrops – but there were some new additions there now. Tied to her back was a sheathed nail barely larger than a dagger but of unfathomable purity, sharp enough to cut sunlight if it so chose. Tied to the sheath was a bladeless nail-hilt, dangling like a decorative talisman, the pearly metal seeming to glow from within. And to her waist, a pair of misshapen horns, cut to equal lengths, pale as the moon; one was thicker and sturdier than the other, its surface worn smooth. She ran her fingers over their chitin, breath held, eyes shut, like she was waiting to awake from a dream.

* * *

The precipitation in Kingdom’s Edge was as persistent as that of the neighboring city – a gentle flurry of flaking ash, the Wyrm’s corpse continuing its endless rot along with the kingdom it had spawned. Belflies and booflies chittered and buzzed uncertainly; numerous of the latter had forgotten to fly after the infection had fled them, and had tumbled to their deaths against the sharp rocks far below. A far more oppressive silence haunted the upper reaches. Ordinary the clang and cheers of the Colosseum would echo here, but its participants had been as wracked by the sickness as any other bug, merely channeling it through bloodsport, and it had been no less unkind to them in its passing. Shortly after the Vessel’s dying screech had faded, the Colosseum’s clamor had stopped with the quickness of a descending guillotine. The stands were now filled with bugs as still and blank-eyed as their deathless, enthroned Fool, and dust sifted across the armor of warriors who’d toppled in mid-execution.

Bardoon, the great caterpillar, who’d interred himself in a hollow of the cavern walls for so long that he now seemed like part of the rock itself, had heard the descent of this new and unnerving silence. He’d initially come to escape the hostility of the light-poisoned creatures below, but had settled into this place quite snugly; he’d lived for so long that life had become more of a habit than anything to strive for. Though he could break the stones like stale bread if he wished, he thought to stay until he became used to the quiet and then doze for a while longer.

But something else was here now. More felt than heard, its presence slithering across the surface of his great and languorous mind. He stared out at the surrounding stones and glimpsed a thread of deeper dark undulating across the walls, up to the ceiling, approaching him on numerous six-fingered hands. At its front it bore a white and misshapen mask that represented no true face, just a constellation of holes like worm-eaten fruit.

“Bardoon,” it said. “Dear friend.”

Its voice was female, croaking with age and yet surprisingly rich. Pleasant, in its way. But underneath its congeniality was a quivering and desperate harmonic that made Bardoon’s stomach clench. That undercurrent had only grown stronger since he’d first heard it.

“I ventured here earlier but you gave no answer. I did not wish to disturb your sleep. It must have been a fine rest, after the Festerglow’s banishment.” The mandibles around the mask spasmed and clacked. “So abhorrent it was. So beautiful. I shall never forget it. Nor all it robbed from this land.”

Bardoon gave no answer. He stared rigidly ahead as the shadow drew closer, tentatively, as if the ceiling on which it scuttled was riddled with tripwires.

“I am on pilgrimage,” she continued. “A tribute to be paid. Markings to be checked. A convergence! A conclusion. Everything is in place and I must show my gratitude, yes, my deepest and most enduring gratitude for all this kingdom has lent me. And for you. Our time together was brief, yet such a balm.” She extended a hand to his carapace. “My final destination is quite far. I detoured, yes, but there is time, has always been time. And to you I wished to show my gratitude, my deepest-”

“Begone, wretched mourner,” Bardoon rumbled. “I do not know you.”

She pulled away from him as if scorched by heat and coiled in on herself, her chitinous hands kneading with clicks like a broken lock. When she spoke again her voice was small and hurt.

“I hope you are well,” she said, and was gone.

The rock around Bardoon cracked with his sighing. He shifted in place, restless now, the silence having become accusatory. His awareness of the kingdom traveled further than sight alone, and now that the Radiance was gone, he could detect the new shadows which had been cast – filigrees of leaking darkness, barely perceptible, trailing far below. He closed his eyes and tried to sleep. But in these new and quiet days, it came more uneasily than ever.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written with acknowledgement and thanks to [Stag Beetles and Broken Legs.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17400464/chapters/40956125)

The stag stations resisted Hallownest’s deprecation better than many of its other locales. Even the Crossroads station, which had suffered a bilious gale of infected air in the seal’s final hours, was mostly unharmed, though the stones around the entrance had developed a nauseatingly slick patina where the taint had sunken in. Hornet’s footsteps echoed as she crossed the platform and approached the bell.

She’d never used the stations, had preferred her own means of conveyance, and this was the first time in a while that she’d paid any of them serious attention. The tunnel beyond was a black mouth. She looked from it to the bell, saw no real means to ring it, and settled for striking it with the hilt of her needle. It let out a single pure note that unfurled onto the tracks beyond. Seconds later, she heard galloping feet, approaching fast.

The stag emerged from that lightless passageway with such suddenness that it almost made her flinch; he slammed his legs down and skidded to a halt, stopping mere inches away from the platform’s edge. A practiced maneuver. He shook dust off his whiskers and cast his shadowed eyes in her direction.

“Hello again, little wanderer,” he said. “I had begun to think that you’d…” He trailed off, peered closer, and started. “Oh! My apologies. I mistook you for someone else.”

“It’s all right. Well met.” She gave the stag a courteous bow and he bent his neck in return. “I am called Hornet, of Deepnest.”

“A-ha! So you’re the warrior that shopkeeper’s wife told me about.” He pawed at the tracks. “It’s been an age since anyone summoned me just to chat, but she’s kept me company a night or two. The banishment of this accursed infection seems to have lifted everyone’s spirits. So, where shall we go?”

“My request is somewhat unusual,” said Hornet. “I do not personally require your services. However, I’m traveling the kingdom in search of anyone who may wish to depart for more hospitable lands. Should I find them, I would like you to ferry them to Dirtmouth where they can take shelter.”

“No trouble at all! I _do_ have an occupancy limit, but I daresay it’s not a problem that multiple trips couldn’t solve.” He tossed his head and lifted his legs in what Hornet had to assume was a pleased gesture. “I wish you the best of luck. It’d be wonderful to carry multiple passengers again.”

“There’s something else. When my trip has ended, you’re also welcome to leave. Getting you out of these tunnels and onto the surface would be a simple matter, if not necessarily a dignified one, and any of the bugs there would be happy to accompany you.”

The stag gave an amused snort. “That other young miss told me similar. It’s very kind of you to offer, but I must decline.”

Hornet sighed internally. It was worth a shot.

“Are you quite certain?” she asked. “I know you stags are accustomed to the tunnels, but you may find passengers scarce in the coming days. Does the open sky hold no appeal?”

“I won’t deny a bit of curiosity, but any vistas would be wasted on these ailing eyes of mine,” said the stag. “I know every bend of these tunnels by heart. Up there, I’d be a blundering deadweight. I’d rather spend my final days surrounded by the familiar.”

“I understand.” And she did, had wrestled with the idea herself over the last two weeks. But the familiar had just become too bitter to the taste.

“And besides,” he continued brightly, “who can say what the future will hold? The plague has been purged, and anything is possible. I could soon have more passengers than I know what to do with!”

“It does one good to hope,” she said gravely. “That said, I’ll leave you be. I have many other places to visit.” She turned to go, and made it as far as the bench before the stag’s voice echoed after her.

“Pardon me? Miss?”

She stopped and looked over her shoulder. Hexapedal body language was still something of a mystery to her, but by the way the stag hung his head and scraped his forelegs on the ground, it was clear he was feeling bashful over whatever he wished to say next.

“I just wanted to know,” he said. “Are you acquainted with a certain young bug? Shorter than yourself, white-masked and horned, on the quiet side? They rode these paths often for a time, but I haven’t seen them since the infection left.”

“That’s not a coincidence,” she said.

“Oh. So you mean…?”

“That bug was created to seal away the infection. It succeeded and then some, destroying it at the source. It perished in the act.” Her words were clipped and flat.

The stag went still, and looked away from her, at the blank wall of the tunnel. “I see.”

“There’s no point in grieving,” she said. “It died with its purpose fulfilled. We all should be so fortunate.”

“Of course,” he said softly. “Thank you for telling me.”

She left the station and went to the edge of the rock outcropping on which it resided, peering down. Quite a bit of Hallownest was constructed in this frankly dangerous way – spirals of jutting rock, connected by thin and ill-maintained paths along the cavern walls. Someone sufficiently athletic could just leap from outcrop to outcrop, but it must have been a chore for anyone less physically inclined. She pondered on this, so that she didn’t have to think about the expression on the stag’s face as she had left him in the dark.

It was understandable that he would have felt some affinity for the second vessel. The little ghost. Bereft of emotion and gesture, it was a blank slate upon which one could etch their own intentions, interpreting its “personality” however they pleased. It had connected the city’s stagways for the first time in many years to better facilitate its goal, allowing him to run free through the kingdom; even if it never spoke or emoted for all that time, it would have been enough to alter the stag’s perception of it.

She took a few steps down the path, running her fingers down the featureless cave wall – it was also slick here, its surface marred by the vitriol of the Radiance’s wrathful light. Then she stopped, and looked closer. It was almost impossible to see, but there were lines etched in the rock, delicate as filigree. Even in this murky cavern, they were unnaturally dark. The shadows almost leaked from them, forming an inscrutable glyph.

A memory arose unbidden – crossing blades with the little ghost in Kingdom’s Edge, buried in the ashen molt of its deceased monarch’s shell. She’d summoned all her training and traps, fought with everything she had, because to allow a weakling past this threshold would be to invite a doom upon her homeland that would have made its current dismal state look trifling…and the little ghost, this void-powered automaton, had batted her aside with effortless ease. Liquid dark had erupted from beneath its cloak, shadows not unlike the ones clustered around these carvings, assailing her in between strokes of that stubby nail. Towards the end, its battle with her had almost seemed playful.

But only seemed. This she knew.

She left the glyph behind – probably some anomaly formed by the Radiance’s influence and destruction, this place would doubtless be riddled with them – and continued to her next stop. The stag was a lost cause, but she thought she’d have more luck with this one.

* * *

She had thought wrong.

“You’re such a _dear_ little thing,” Salubra burbled. “And so polite! But I’m well settled, thank you.”

“You could be useful up there,” Hornet said, her voice carrying a heavy freight of patience. “Your talents in the Soul arts must be considerable. Wouldn’t you like to ply your trade where it would be more welcome?”

Salubra made a dainty gesture. “Such diplomacy! You make a fine point. But this village would be ever so deprived without me.”

“This village is _empty._ There’s no one here!”

“Now, that’s not nice,” she chided. “I know these folk can be rather drab, but you shouldn’t speak of them like they don’t exist.”

The great slug’s shop was heavily perfumed, terribly cramped, and utterly bereft of merchandise. A rosy haze hung in the air and curled around the empty shelves, velvet impressions where the charm-master’s miraculous baubles had once nestled. Hornet had always been reluctant to use them. The Weavers had told her the secret of them, how they were born from the dying wishes of departed bugs, and exploiting them for her own uses had struck her as distasteful when her needle did the job quite nicely. But that also meant she’d never visited Salubra herself, and had drastically mis-calculated the slug’s personality. Perpetually chuckling, the jewelry she wore (mundane glass and resin, nothing magical there) clinked and shivered from the tectonic force of her mirth, sliding about her body’s substantial curves. She seemed to believe the kingdom’s downfall was a humorous anecdote she’d heard from the neighbors, though the homes here had been abandoned so long that even the cobwebs had turned to dust. She was mad. Harmlessly so, but it made her difficult to reason with.

Hornet tried anyway. She swept her hand across the empty displays.

“Your stock appears lacking,” she said.

“Yes, business has boomed! All thanks to a single customer’s generosity, but we can’t choose from whence fortune comes.”

Of course. When she’d regained consciousness in the Temple of the Black Egg, charms had been strewn around her in a gaudy constellation. The little ghost had been a big spender.

“Perhaps you’d care to venture outside in search of more?” she suggested. “The, erm, neighbors may have some to trade.”

“I will, I will. All in good time.” Her hands slapped wetly on the countertop. “Though quite often they come to me! Washed up, like pebbles on the shore. Have you been to the Blue Lake? It’s a lovely spot for picnicking.”

She would not be diverted. “So you’re staying, then.”

“Naturally. I don’t begrudge you at all for your wanderlust, but Hallownest is such a cozy place. I couldn’t have asked for anywhere better to live.”

 _You witless hag_ , she thought, anger rising in her like steam. _Your charms are scattered and no one will ever lay eyes on them or you again. That insufferable laughter echoes in a world of the dead._

Then it passed, leaving her faintly dizzy. She put a hand to her forehead, and Salubra’s chuckling abated for a moment. She leaned forward on her counter, frowning.

“Are you alright, sweetheart? You look out of sorts.”

“I’m fine,” she said. “Thank you for your time. I won’t trouble you any further.”

“Don’t be a stranger. And if you see a certain dashing white-masked bug, tell them to visit again. The very sight of them invigorates me like little else!”

Again she froze at a doorway, this time in utter bafflement. “Dashing” was not an adjective she would have applied to the little ghost, unless a high-velocity nail swipe was involved. She looked back at Salubra.

“This bug,” she said. “Did it happen to do anything…noteworthy here? Besides purchase all your stock.”

“So the two of you _do_ know each other!” She clapped her hands in delight. “Aren’t they fetching? So entrancingly _stoic._ But also thoughtful, underneath it all. I can always tell with quiet ones.”

That was a no. She felt the beginnings of a headache. “Good day to you, madame.”

Salubra waved goodbye, and by the time Hornet had stepped outside the building, she’d started laughing again. The sound followed Hornet all the way to the village.

It was a miserable strip of soot-colored huts that made even Dirtmouth look palatial, the pathways between them well-trod by the dreaming dead and stained with that same slickness from the dripping infection. Most of the doorways yawned open, the hinges having given way ages ago. Hornet stepped in one and found it almost wholly gutted – the only detail was a picture frame atop a splintery shelf, with whatever image it had contained either torn out or eaten wholly by mold. She looked back in the direction of Salubra’s shop, where she was doubtless still giggling. There was no way she could have obtained food or water in here; for someone of her size, even leaving the building would have taken care and effort. Hallownest itself sustained her.

It was one of the more insidious properties of this place. The Pale King had passed but his influence still lingered, and some part of his will, that dedication to the unchanging, must have infused itself into Hallownest’s very atmosphere. It explained that discordant lurch of the years. Down here, bugs could go for days or more without rest or sustenance, and the effect seemed especially potent for the driven and determined, as if they continued to live on their fixations alone. Hornet herself had become familiar with its effects, often catching herself midway through spearing some wayward husk to question when she had last thought of anything but the abandoned kingdom’s protection. Not for nothing did Hallownest seem to attract hermits, fanatics, and obsessives, those who could exist quite comfortably and indefinitely within this bubble of stagnant time…at least until one of its innumerable dangers took their lives instead.

Hornet wondered if this effect had been removed with the Radiance’s death. Probably not. It was unbound from the infection’s light. Salubra could cackle in her empty, rose-smelling shop until the very sky collapsed on her.

Next was the City of Tears, a place she did not relish, but at least the map’s assistance guaranteed that her trip would be short. She stepped back out into the village road and flung her needle at the ceiling. It embedded itself in the rock overhead, and a filament of soul-thread around her wrist snapped taut, and tugged. Then she was up and away, leaving the Crossroads behind.

Silence curled around the abandoned houses. On one of them was a crosshatching of lines, blacker than black, intersecting in a shape that would make the viewer’s eyes water. But there was nobody to see.

* * *

Hornet had cultivated ill feelings towards the City of Tears long before she first saw it for herself. It was the Pale King’s crown jewel, a metropolis that sat atop Deepnest like a choking fungus, and she had only set foot here when her grisly duty had first begun. The “beasts” (and what a pleasant word Hallownest had used to brand the bugs who’d raised her) were a pragmatic lot. The Weavers, the Midwife, and Herrah herself had told Hornet the circumstances of her birth when she’d asked; their answers had first been given in language that the young could understand, and grew in complexity along with her questions. Fair bargain struck, for sacrifice made. They had not been unkind in the telling. Herrah especially had spoken of the Pale King in terms that could almost be called gentle. The loathing Hornet had felt for him and his encroaching civilization had been all her own.

Still, she took little pleasure in the city’s new stillness. Before it had been a-clamor with the oblivious march and buzz of the infected guardsmen, eager to cut down anyone who still had their wits about them; those guards now lay with all the others, and their weapons would rust in their deathgrip. She swung around the streets for a time to familiar vantages, peering through apartment windows and inside alleys for movement, but saw only the dripping rain. She had to side with Iselda on this matter – had the infection spared any bugs still living here, then they would have rendered their own means of escape a long time ago. The civilians were too soft to linger in such a miserable, lifeless place, and in the slim chance any guards had survived, they would have probably trooped up to Dirtmouth to enlist the very aid Hornet now provided.

She paused on an eave and bent low, the city spires all around her, slashes of blue in deeper gloom. It was time to rely on the map.

Its rendering of the city was simpler than most – understandably so, a proper map of this place would have necessitated a whole other roll of parchment – but one ground-floor apartment was marked by roughly drawn flower buds, not far from the stag station. Hornet hadn’t been sure what to expect there, but when she spotted the place, she was unsurprised by what she saw. The doorway was indeed surrounded by flowers. It was natural that the little ghost would have simply recreated what it had seen; its ilk hadn’t been granted an imagination.

She descended to the street, advanced toward the apartment, and stopped. From the doorway drifted more laughter, high and tittering. These survivors were apparently a jolly lot.

She stepped inside. Shortly after, she found herself regretting that decision immensely.

This was the upper-caste district of the city, everything plush red velvet that had gone sopping and moldy from the constant drip. The bug who resided here – Emilitia, she’d called herself, with considerable haughtiness – sat on a relatively dry couch, surrounded by flowers that twisted out of scattered pots and vases filled with muck scraped from places unknown. Their petals glowed a soft scarlet and their sweet smell cut through the damp, and it would have made the place rather inviting, if not for its resident. Emilitia had been exiled from her social circle for some unknown offense shortly before the infection had struck, and had whiled away the time since watching their misery from the comfort of her window-side. Hornet had been forced to listen to this for what felt like a lifetime.

“And then there was that _awful_ little spinster, Fi or Vi or whatever her name was,” Emilitia went on, legs kicking with the effort of her recollection. “Her father may have been in the King’s court but _everyone_ knew her cousin was a mere _guardsman_ , and she had this _vile_ habit of sniffling over her tea at luncheons. She wore some _tacky_ little pendant, made of resin, not even properly polished. It had been crafted by her grandmother, she said. Ha! As though that was any excuse for subjecting our community to something so gauche! I saw her stumbling about with all the others, the pendant still at her neck. Oh, what a grand day that was!”

Perhaps the infection hadn’t been quite thorough enough, Hornet thought, but took a deep breath and kept her voice level.

“Be that as it may,” she said, “your former neighbors are now truly dead. I doubt it will quite as…entertaining…to watch their shells decompose. We are arranging a caravan to other lands. There is room for you, if you wish.”

Emilitia’s mirth ceased at that. She leaned forward in her seat, subjected Hornet to a hard stare.

“I’ll admit your way of speaking is acceptably cultured,” she said. “But it’s clear you know very little of the world. There is no place grander than Hallownest.”

Hornet took a long, slow look at the drenched mausoleum outside this room, and then back at Emilitia.

“Don’t make that face,” the noblewoman snapped, though Hornet’s mask betrayed nothing. “This kingdom was sanctioned by the great and eternal Wyrm, and its call can still be heard throughout whatever blighted lands lay outside it. More will come, seeking to bask in its majesty. And what do you think they’ll find?”

“Corpses?” Hornet suggested. “In vast quantities?”

“Me!” she said, squaring her shoulders. “The bug who outlived all others! Final remnant of the highest caste. A new society will form in the shadow of the old, and I will stand atop it, as it should have been from the very start. You ask that I abandon that for a dusty road and the company of commoners? You must be quite insane.”

Hornet gave a stiff bow. “Then I apologize for my insanity. I’ll be off.”

“Wait, wait, don’t go,” she said. “I also apologize. My tongue does tend to wag. You’re a scruffy thing, but it’s clear you have some manners. Not unlike that little grub who wandered in here recently. A fine listener, it was.” She tilted her head in contemplation. “It must have died with all the others. Eaten by those barbaric beasts underground, maybe. I hope they choked on it.”

Emilitia tittered again, and Hornet serenely imagined driving her needle through the woman’s eye. Instead she just turned and left without another word.

Her foul mood was guaranteed to darken further en route to her next destination. The quickest path was through the fountain square, possibly the one place in the city that she despised most. It wouldn’t have been hard to detour around it, but she pressed on, hoping this more familiar resentment would wipe clean the memories of that airy, insufferable laugh.

The fountain’s silhouette emerged from the mist. She sidled up to it, as if those stone heads would turn to face her if she made too much commotion.

As she had said to Sheo, Hornet knew little of art (beyond the Weavers’ webs, which bore an aesthetic and appeal all their own). But even she could tell that the sculptures were exquisite. The cloaks of Knight and Dreamers were rendered in graceful curves indistinguishable from true fabric, guiding the rainwater down their lengths in shining channels. The knight’s blank mask had been angled and carved in such a way so that it seemed to change expression as one approached – its sternness transfiguring into something almost almost nurturing, head bowed from the weight of its duty. Hornet had first hated this place because of the way it had stolen the image of her mother and repurposed it as a tribute to the King’s folly. Now, this central figure made her stomach twist all the more.

Her hand once again crept beneath her cloak. She gripped the thicker of the horns concealed there and the threads binding it to her waist unraveled. She held it up, against the knight’s form. Though this was just the very edge of the horn, its curvature matched its sculpted duplicate precisely.

Those ornate robes, recreated in soaking stone. The moldered rag that had billowed around the shrieking Vessel’s neck as she’d plunged her needle into its head. Were they one in the same? Had the King’s executors swaddled it in such finery before marching it into the Temple of the Black Egg? For what purpose? Why would they so elegantly clothe a thing never meant to be seen?

“Who were you?” she asked, and it took a moment before she realized she’d spoken aloud.

* * *

The second point of interest was harder to find, the map’s pin having been stuck somewhere in one of these labyrinthine towers. Hornet found what was probably the correct one, took the lift upward (kicking another corpse off as she did so) and patrolled the halls for any signs of life. She called out, waiting for an answer, hearing none. This part of the city had interiors far less plush, their colors trending rainwater-blue, and the sameness of it all swam in front of her eyes. She leaned against a wall and shut them a bit before continuing on. No idea how long she’d already been on this errand, but Hallownest’s atmosphere wasn’t keeping her weariness at bay.

Finally, she found something. A sheet of fresh parchment had been stuck to a distant door, its clean white like a beacon in all this murk. Just beside it was a sign bearing the same abstractly pointy design as the one she’d seen on the map’s pin. Hornet approached the note and read. Or at least made the effort. It had been written in a crabbed, cramped hand, and though the parchment was sturdy, the corners were already wrinkled a bit from all this moisture. It was like the message existed less for the benefit of visitors and more for the author’s own esoteric amusement.

_Customers: you have come to the shop of Lemm the Relic Seeker, appraiser, purchaser, and collector of artifacts and curiosities. I would be present and glad to receive you under normal circumstances, but I have regrettably been cajoled by an imbecile into taking a “scholarly” expedition to faraway lands, and do not expect to return for some time. Should your travels ever circle back to this little corner of the world, please come again._

_Thieves: I commend your efforts to attain wealth in such a treacherous place as this. It would be foolish – nay, disrespectful! – to believe that mere physical impediments would stymie them. My door is unlocked; I invite you into my home. Should any of the relics therein be disturbed, I invite you further to contemplate the horrific menagerie of curses that will be engraved upon your soul. The thought of your suffering will more than alleviate my own paltry losses._

_The diminutive mute (you know who you are): I'm sure you’ve arrived with another cartful of gewgaws to push beneath my tired eyes. Kindly take them elsewhere. I am well, and shall be all the better knowing that you are engaged in more productive endeavors than haunting my foyer. I wish you good fortune, wherever you may choose to find it._

_\- Relic Seeker Lemm_

She regarded the note. She regarded the doorknob. She looked back and forth between the two several more times. And then she gripped the knob, gingerly as if expecting it to explode in her hand, and went inside.

The shop within was cramped as Lenn’s penmanship, its shelves crammed with what, to Hornet’s eyes, was a mad jumble of bric-a-brac so tightly packed that she could scarcely discern where one shape began and another ended. Hornet was no Soul master, but she was sensitive enough to its stirrings to tell that there were no curses, horrific or otherwise, laid on this merchandise. The lamp was out, and one of the tower’s great windows cast soggy light over the collection. She could see the memorial fountain on the grounds beyond.

There was a second door behind the counter, nearly smothered by the adjacent merchandise, and she went through it and found herself in another apartment – far smaller and less luxurious than Emilitia’s, but also mostly relic-free. She explored it with the wandering step of a sleepwalker, peering into the tiny study (on the desk, a metallic egg’s surface shone like quicksilver), the bedroom (the coverlet rumpled and unmade), the kitchen (its scent still carrying the ghosts of simple meals past).

In the kitchen she saw a teakettle on the burner. She stood in place, considering just how far she could invade this acerbic shopkeeper’s propriety without feeling guilty about it, and came to a decision. She tapped the lantern nearby and the lumafly within stirred to sluggish life, so she could see the contents of the cabinets as she pulled them open, one by one. Eventually she found a neat little stack of tea tins; she took one up, gave it an experimental shake, and then located matches and a teapot and got to work.

Tea was one of Hornet’s few pleasures, though no one still living was aware of this. The Weavers had their own, brewed mostly from lichen, and while she’d come to find its bitterness quite bracing, she wasn’t averse to the leafy teas of the kingdom above. She’d never bothered to learn the difference between blends, but as it brewed, she found the smell tolerable enough. She unslung her needle and carefully set it aside, and then stood there in the middle of the kitchen as the tea steeped. The lumafly was half-starved, and in its feeble light she appeared somehow frail.

She took a cup, poured, sipped, and then carried it to the table, which was set against the window. This apartment wasn’t high enough to offer a very fine view, the towers’ lines hacking up the grey horizon like prison bars, but at least she couldn’t see the fountain. The smaller horn she carried jabbed into her side.

“He was fond of you,” she said to the window-glass. “Did you come here often?” She turned back to her cup and huffed, startling the wafts of steam. “I’m sure you did. You went everywhere often, it seems.”

She took another sip. Neither horn nor window nor the empty chair across from her offered any response.

“Maybe it was that familiarity which influenced their opinion,” she mused. “All we ever did was cross blades. No opportunity for my judgement to be affected.”

But that wasn’t true, was it. Mere familiarity didn’t explain that dried flower under the Elderbug’s cloak. When he’d eagerly told her of how he’d come by it, she had felt her throat close up and then retreated to her quarters for the rest of the day. She couldn’t tease out a sufficiently pragmatic explanation for why the little ghost would have done such a thing. It didn’t fit. And now she recalled those sketched flowers around Emilitia’s apartment on the map, and the teacup almost cracked in her grip.

Had there been signs even before then? There was the lip of the Abyss, where she’d stood to watch the little ghost’s bounding climb from the dark below. She’d been stern as always, but before they’d parted ways, she had thought, just for a moment…

Well, it was too late now.

The tea quickened her heart but its smell was soporific, and her tiredness soon triumphed over the caffeine. She pushed the cup away and sank into the chair, and the patter of rain by her ear rocked her down into uneasy sleep.

* * *

_The needle withdrew from the guardsman’s head, leaving a neat hole from which orange smoke gushed, sickly-sweet. It let out a rattling wheeze and took a reeled step backward, and then collapsed and was still. Rainwater gurgled around its shell._

_Hornet replaced her weapon and looked around. A half-dozen other corpses lay in similar state around her on the street. For now, nothing else moved, but orange light still flitted through distant alleys._

_She would never know the multitude of names that Hallownest’s bugs had ascribed to their affliction in the final days. They’d called it the Plague of Dreams, the Light-that-Hates, the Festerglow, as though diluting it with so many different monikers would somehow also lessen its potency. Herrah the Beast, striker of fair bargains, had been inducted into the true cause behind the infection, and before she and Hornet had said their final goodbyes, she had shared this information with her characteristic bluntness. The Radiance, it was called – both the light, and its source. Victim of the Pale King’s usurpations, the infection was the manifest form of the old god’s outrage, its shriek for release. The seal for which Herrah had sacrificed herself had contained it for a time. Then it had stopped._

_The Weavers had known. Their silk could generate tapestries and songs of such beauty to make the knees buckle, but under their accomplished artistry they were hard-eyed and practical as wartime commanders – a trait Herrah herself had shared – and they had lain their own plans after the Beast’s departure. The least news of the infection’s recurrence shivered their webbing, a wisp of orange light in some luckless spider’s dream, and the next day they had stampeded out of Deepnest through secret byways and torn the routes down in their wake so none could follow. They had offered to take Hornet with them. But she had made a promise._

_She’d bade farewell to them and been left alone with only the chitter of dream-maddened beasts for company. She’d lingered at Deepnest’s exit and listened to the sound of her kin being slaughtered by the mantises, their warriors’ minds focused enough to guard against the infection entirely (she and they seldom spoke – they kept their blades sheathed around her, either out of respect for her sire or knowledge that the infection also had no purchase on her, but she would never forgive them for their vigil and they also knew that full well). Then she had left through other exits, the training she’d undertaken with her weapon finally put to use, as she explored the fabled kingdom of Hallownest for the first time._

_She hardened herself against wonder. The verdant landscapes to the west, the snowfall of molt to the east, the shimmering Blue Lake and the eternal metropolis on which it rained – all of them were mere shapes through which the orange light wandered and had to be snuffed out. There had been fumbles in the early days, times when she’d been forced to retreat and bind her wounds from some lucky nail-swipe or needle-burst (she was still hesitant to engage the city’s great sentries), but she held her own well enough. Orphan-princess, truant royal, now conscripted to defend the corpse of a kingdom she had never claimed. The Dreamers’ sleep would remain unbroken, so that the Radiance’s fury would not extend past Hallownest’s borders._

_It was work that be forever undone. She couldn’t single-handedly butcher the entire population, and even then, she would swear that the fallen would just get back up and resume their wandering after a time – she would clear a street only to find it populated by suspiciously similar bugs a week later, like the infection had re-entered their wounds and pulled them shut behind it. She did not resent the circumstances of her birth; she was surrounded by proof that many others were less fortunate. But joy was already a foreign country to her. All that remained was duty._

_She left the bodies behind and darted up the spires, her threads pulling her from window to eave; the rain spattered against her mask as she swung through the City of Tears, her needle glinting like a wayward star. She came to rest outside a broken still and sat upon its stone lip, her weapon against her shoulder, water soaking cold through her cloak. Below her, the Festerglow’s lights drifted, endless and ineradicable as the raindrops themselves. She watched their movement, and swallowed her loneliness until she could no longer taste it._

* * *

Greenpath and the Fungal Caverns had taken the Radiance’s undoing harder than most. Plant life continued to flourish, but the Mosskin, abandoned first by sleeping god Unn and now by the infection’s compulsions, had gone inert, their corpses already planting roots. In the depths of Greenpath was a cavern bearing a succession of stalactites and stalagmites like slavering fangs, its edges scored with great clawmarks, the only evidence of whatever had lived there. The mantises, with their own duties fulfilled and no more challenges to be sought, had fled Hallownest entirely, headed for unknown lands through unknown byways. And the luckless Mushroom Clan, who’d been tempted by the Pale King’s promises only to fall under the sway of the god he’d usurped, had been especially vulnerable – the infection and its subsequent removal cascaded across their shared mind, and all of them died where they stood. The only movement in the Fungal Core came from pools of bubbling acid, casting their own light across a fallen multitude.

Then, it came. Sinuous shadow on chittering hands.

With liquid grace she descended, crawling from wall to toadstool, her hands finding purchase on both with mechanical ease. In the acid’s glow it was possible to see that several of these hands were malformed, missing fingers, and some of them were gone entirely, reduced to charred and wavering stumps compensated by their fellows. But she had seventeen segments, yes, the black seventeen, each with its own set of limbs, and though some of her shell had also been sacrificed, the acid illuminating the difference between slick carapace and raw meat, it had been a trifling cost. Her hole-studded mask swiveled and wavered. It never kept still.

In this part of the cavern, Shrumal Warriors and their spawn were scattered like leaves, the former’s eyes also reduced to vacant holes. She rose up and looked about, her many hands kneading, and then slithered to the cave wall and extended a talon, giving the rock a single scratch. Then she bent low to it and whispered a word like the crunch of grave-dirt underfoot, and the mark she’d left and those it intersected darkened further, seemed to leak.

“Witness,” she said. “Watcher, teacher, beast and knight. His beating heart, his open eye. Oh. Oh.”

She scuttled away and scooped up two of the fallen mushroom-people, embraced them. Their mycelial ligaments had already rotted so that their heads and jaws lolled as she raised them up, and their flesh was tender as punky wood. It tore in her grip, opening into black and bloodless mouths, but she paid it no heed. Her voice trembled with reverence.

“All of it remembered,” she said. “All for you, beloved usurper-King.”


	3. Chapter 3

The corpse before Hornet had a silhouette eerily reminiscent of her own, albeit with an extra horn protruding from her mask and armor that bloomed outward from her stalk-thin frame; if set upside down, it would have resembled a white rose. She gave the body a gentle prod and it slumped down further, rattling hollowly. Any shape that existed behind that mask and mail had long since crumbled to dust.

Hornet gazed up at the structure it had protected. She was already having second thoughts.

She’d plumbed the emptiness around the city, taking a brief and cautious trip through the reeking waterways and then freshening herself in the pollinated air of Greenpath. Further down lay the husk-strewn route into Deepnest, and at that crossroad she had hesitated and doubled back, re-tracing the greenery instead into the thorned and overrun gardens. She was stalling, and doing so in a way that she was bound to find unpleasant, but Deepnest represented the end of her journey through the kingdom’s remains. She’d had no success in finding fellow refugees, and would absolutely find none here either, but this was still required, a grim and necessary chore.

The cocoon was constructed of innumerable wafer-thin layers like a wasp nest, albeit made of far stronger stuff; the Five Great Knights working in tandem could not have peeled back a single sheet of it. Yet through its outermost walls jutted numerous ivory tendrils, smooth and cold as marble and glowing with moon-pale light. The Root, constricted.

In her childhood, Hornet had received perhaps four or five missives requesting her at the White Palace, all of them dictated by the its Lady. They had been delivered by haughty guardsmen whose presence Deepnest had suffered like a tumor, and even through the officious language and the contempt of their messengers, the requests had contained a certain hesitant gentleness, an earnest desire to connect. Hornet had sent them all away. Herrah and the Weavers had neither praised nor protested this decision, or asked Hornet for the reasoning behind it, and Hornet had kept those reasons to herself. If compelled to share, she may have said that it was simply a consequence of the bargain that had birthed her. By its terms, Hallownest had already gained her mother’s life. She would not allow it to taste even a sliver of her own.

Viewed from a different perspective, she knew that her obstinance would have appeared to be mere adolescent sulkiness. But she had still refused to open herself to Hallownest’s monarchs. Even after its fall, her visits to this cocoon could have been counted on one hand, and the conversations therein were brief and pulsing with unspoken resentment. And the Pale King, right up until the day of his disappearance, had never sent a message of his own, not a line, remaining as distant and inscrutable as the stars.

She heaved a sigh and stepped into the cocoon.

The earthen passage through here was deceptively deep, the roots’ soft glow leading the way. The chamber containing the bound goddess herself spilled yet brighter into the tunnel. Hornet gave her eyes a moment to adjust and then entered, with a small and futile prayer that its occupant would be asleep, granting her a reason to leave without further conversation.

No such luck. The White Lady’s blind eyes were open wide, and the lilting echo of her voice greeted her the moment her first footstep crunched in the chamber. Her bindings were unlike the material that made up the cocoon, probably stronger by an order of magnitude, and they rustled as she bowed to Hornet, the merest fraction that her captivity would allow. 

“Dear Hornet,” she said. “I dared not hope you would visit again.”

“Hope was not required,” she said curtly. “Here I am.”

“I sense it. The fever-light’s end. Not just containment, but cessation. The silence is…eerie, in its way. But the success is comforting, after these long years.”

“The success is long past due,” said Hornet. “Nothing remains to be saved. I’ve ascertained that myself.”

The White Lady blinked, once, slowly, the milky blue of her eyes eclipsing with white. “I am sorry to hear it. But the sacrifice was not meaningless. My people were released from the plague of dreams, and whatever lands which lie outside this one may rest with one peril fewer. If she had come unchained, the Radiance’s wrath would not have been content with the leavings of this kingdom. It would have spilled out, to untold distances.”

“I’m sure your stillborn brood would have been warmed by your gratitude, had they the capacity for emotions,” Hornet said.

The barb had been rehearsed; it had thudded in her head ever since Greenpath. She had thought the White Lady would show indignation, callousness, maybe even a show of actual sadness, but the she merely tilted her head, the roots anchoring her in place creaking through the ceiling.

“Such animosity,” she said. “Then, why do I smell them here?”

Hornet’s hand instinctively went to her cloak and she forced it down again before those horns could be exposed. Not that it seemed to matter – blind though she was, the Root’s senses existed on planes apparently unknown to her. She spoke again, with a pitying tone that rasped Hornet’s nerves raw.

“Are they mementos? Remains? Nevertheless. Hollow and void-born they may have been, but you need not be ashamed of lingering attachment. They are, in a way, your siblings.”

“My familial connection to them is as irrelevant as my connection to you,” she retorted. She then allowed herself the briefest pause before saying, “If you truly do feel grateful to them, then perhaps you know some way they can be restored?”

“Oh, Hornet.” Now the pity in that voice had deepened, and she wanted more than anything to flee this place. This wasn’t going how she’d expected at all.

“I asked you a question,” she said, trying to sound like an imperious defender of the realm and not the lost child she was rapidly receding into. “Speak plainly or fall silent.”

“Their shells are cracked, their essence returned to inchoate Void. There may be some faint trace of it in whatever you have carried here, but you can no more restore them than you could locate a particular droplet of water in the Blue Lake. Their purpose is fulfilled. They are released.”

“So they are,” she said, fists clenched. “And I am, too. Farewell, White Lady.”

“Hornet.” Now her roots seemed to tremble. “I am in no position to request favors, but I wish our final parting not be on such a bitter note.”

“I’m hesitant to accept sentimentality from someone who cast aside thousands of her own children.”

“Then I shall allow no ambiguity on the matter,” said the White Lady. “I feel shame for my part in that bleak errand. But no regret. It was successful, overdue or not.” She sighed. “Perhaps your uncharitable assessment of me was correct. The Wyrm was always the softer of us two.”

Hornet looked up sharply, her mask hiding her incredulity. “You expect me to believe that?”

“It’s the truth. Our plot, your distance, all of it wounded him deeply.”

“If my distance so _wounded_ him, then why were all the missives to Deepnest dictated by you?” Not that she would have answered them anyway, but nevertheless, the thought of the Pale King, statuesque and seamless as the idols in his likeness, bearing some tortured grief was so absurd that she couldn’t tear herself away from it.

“He was concerned that the circumstances of your birth would prejudice you against him,” said the White Lady. “Make no mistake, you would have been well-received at our court. But he would have preferred you to stay unseen than witness any possible resentment. I did worry about him. Especially in those final days. This kingdom’s state troubled him so.” Those milky eyes gained a wistful cast. “He loved you all. But a god’s love is oft a cold thing.”

Something stirred in Hornet at those words. She’d deliberately buried most of her memories, partly to better focus on her duty, partly out of some paranoid belief that, if they were allowed to surface in her dreams, they would be seized upon and twisted by the Radiance’s light. But now she recalled a hanging web, a dark lake, her mother’s oblong hulk at her side, and she had to swallow hard to keep her voice steady in her response.

“Is that right,” she said. “How fortunate, then, that I had the love of a Beast.”

“I am truly glad that Herrah inspired such fondness. Will you not visit her, before your final departure?”

“The idea had crossed my mind. Pointless though it may be.”

“Not at all. It shows tenderness. I had hoped that your long vigil over this kingdom would not harden you completely. It is a relief to hear that you think of her still.”

 _This isn’t fair,_ she thought. _You’re not supposed to be this way. Not now._

“Shouldn’t you leave as well?” she said quietly. “How long must this idiotic atonement last? Do you intend to stay in these binds until you rot?”

“I could break them if I desired,” said the White Lady. “Unfurl my full magnificence. Breed an entire new kingdom of ardent worshipers. And then what? What misfortune would follow?” She fell silent, and again her roots shivered. “Hornet. There is something I wish to tell you.”

The tenor of her voice set a part of Hornet’s mind to howling. _Run away,_ it said. _You do not want to hear this. Flee from this infanticidal wretch and don’t look back._

“What is it?” she asked.

The bindings around her chest surged and receded as she breathed deep. She was getting her words in order, Hornet realized. It was her last chance to break away. But then the White Lady started to talk.

“I told you of the Wyrm’s softness,” she said. “Few know the truth behind the Vessel's existence. But only I know of the truth behind that one. After it climbed from the pit of its discarded fellows, the Wyrm took it into our court. He treated it…affectionately. Indulgently so. I do not know if that affection was ever returned. But if it had been, then that may have been the seed of our final undoing. The kernel of thought upon which the Radiance could lay claim.”

Hornet said nothing.

“A fitting fate, I suppose,” the Lady mused. “My Wyrm took the form of mortal bugs to better engender their sympathies, but in so doing, he inherited their frailties as well. Hallownest, a hive of failed gods…” She closed her eyes again, and this time her porcelain features actually creased in pain. “Dryya is dead, isn’t she?”

“Yes,” Hornet heard herself say. “For some time now.”

“And the others? My sweet knights?”

“Ogrim still lived. He seems to have left. I know nothing of the others.”

“A small mercy. May his gallantry serve him well. As for the rest of us…” She shook her head. “Turn your back on this this Root, Hornet. Pay respects to your mother, and leave us failed gods in the ruins of our folly. This penitence may be an indulgence in itself, but I find it preferable to any alternative.”

There were still questions that could be asked. Tales to be told, of the court and kingdom which Hornet had sequestered herself against. She knew that the White Lady would need very little prodding to bend her ear for hours, even days, the two of them preserved in this soil-smelling prison as the past unspooled around them. But instead she just bowed, forgetting that the Lady would be unable to see it.

“By your leave,” she said, and went.

She exited the cocoon’s threshold without another glance at Dryya’s corpse, and kept walking, until she came to a stone archway constricted by thorny brambles. She leaned against it and contemplated seizing one of those vines and gripping it tight until the pain pushed these images out of her head. This unexpected, unwanted speculation. The Pale King, his shape always consumed in the cold light he extruded, and the first Vessel, a shrieking wight from which the Festerglow spilled like pus. And the former had cared for the latter, out of…what? Guilt? Longing? Some displaced sentiment that he’d held for herself, the bargained child? She tried to imagine them together and couldn’t envision it. All her mind could conjure was that statue, dressed in those fine and ornate robes, the Hollow Knight walking stoically into the liquid dark of the Black Egg as the King filled the throne room with his shine…

And now she did grab the brambles, the pain roaring up through her arm and erasing all other thought. She straightened and wiped her hand on her cloak.

All irrelevant. The task was done, all bridges burned. She’d spent long enough in this place to learn that nothing good would come of indulging ghosts.

It was time to return home – home, or something like it. She would forego the main entrance, instead take the side-tunnel that led directly from the gardens. With a bit of luck, she would encounter someone else there. He was even less likely to follow her out of Hallownest than the Root, but at this point, she thought a chat with him would be a welcome relief.

* * *

The air here was different. Not just from the gardens (nowhere else in these caverns would have an atmosphere so cloying) but from everywhere in Hallownest, and perhaps any other land above. The darkness in Deepnest cultivated unique breeds of mosses and fungi, and this flora combined with the shed carapaces of its unique inhabitants gave the tunnels a dusty spice that stirred nostalgic feelings in Hornet every time she ventured here. The Radiance had destroyed the minds of her kin, but it hadn’t been able to take away the smell.

And before the Radiance’s resurgence, Deepnest had stubbornly held fast against the invasion of pale light – rebuffing the King’s missionaries, resisting his trade, destroying his trams – and without the stultifying grasp of his civilization, it had gained some strange inhabitants indeed. The Weavers were the most noteworthy, migrants from distant lands who’d crept under the Radiance’s light in the old days, when the moths still placated her. But there were others, and Hornet heard the busy pitter-pat of one such stranger’s chisel as she crept through the carcass of her home.

He was there as always, behind his workdesk, a hulking hunchback of a bug with arms nearly twice as long as she was tall; they bent and darted at bewildering angles as he engaged in his craft. His mask (for now) was teardrop-shaped, six eyeholes arranged in its bulbous lower half. The cave behind him was crammed as ever with unworn examples of his handiwork, and he chipped and painted and busily added to their number as Hornet approached.

“Mask Maker,” she said. “It is I.”

“That it is,” he said. And no more. He continued to work, humming tunelessly.

No one knew his origin. He had just materialized here one day along with his rough-hewn desk, not long after Hornet’s birth, the first few masks he’d chipped out already scattered in the chamber behind him like fallen leaves. Deepnest’s residents were fiercely protective of their territory, especially after the failed tram expansion, and their warnings to the Mask Maker had been snarling and filled with teeth. As Herrah told it, his failure to heed said warnings had been so complete that it had confused the beasts into leaving him be, and over time they had found his obvious madness almost charming. Faces for the faceless, he called his work, though to everyone else’s knowledge, no one ever requested or received one of his pieces – after all, they had faces, and could hardly be considered part of his clientele. The Weavers were especially delighted by this quixotic labor, having woven artistry into every aspect of their own society, and would sometimes provide him with shells and paints as a courtesy, though he’d seemed more than capable of fetching his own materials from places unknown.

You could balance the whole world upon the fulcrum of the Mask Maker’s obsession; in a sense, this made him Hallownest’s perfect resident. Hornet wasn’t surprised that the Radiance hadn’t touched him. A mind this knotty was more than even gods would want to bother with.

“The infection has been banished,” she said. “Did you notice?”

“Mm. The kingdom’s face concealed behind a veil of light. Now it is torn away! But what lies beneath? Another mask, more decrepit still.” He chiseled an eyehole smooth. “The face hides yet deeper. Long forgotten. Long enshadowed.”

That was probably a yes. “My vigil is ended. I am leaving Hallownest. If you wish to ply your craft elsewhere, you are welcome to come along.”

The Mask Maker set his tools aside and picked up his latest piece – mid-sized but quite thick, adorned with curved mandibles and a neat four-circle grid of eyes. He flicked it onto a shelf where it clattered snugly among its fellows, and then hoisted up a slab of polished chitin the size of a greatshield. Despite its size, lifting it took no apparent effort on his part, and he gently set it down and picked up brush and chisel once more.

“For the faceless, I provide,” he said. “Gifts to a world deserving. But the world is full of faces and those who would hide them. My presence there, redundant. Unneeded.”

“Do you expect to find many customers down here?”

“Ghosts. Shades. The forgotten and unmourned. Faceless, yes, one and all. Who would aid them? I must. I remain.”

Lunacy, every word. But this elliptical speech was almost soothing after what she’d endured up in the gardens. She sighed and watched him work; it would be many hours before this latest mask began to take shape. But while the Mask Maker’s hands did not stop, his own mask looked up to face her, that circle of eyes lancing through.

“Your mask is in fine form,” he said. “Has the truant-princess chosen a destination?”

That may have been the most coherent thing he’d ever said to her. It took her a moment to recover from it.

“None yet,” she said. “But the roads are many, and I have a mapmaker in my company.”

“The Weavers, too, departed. Gone west to native Pharloom, lands of silk and song. They did not begrudge your task. Those footprints, you may trace.”

Had she known the Weavers’ destination? She must have; there was no reason they would conceal it from her. But the memory had atrophied. She stood dumbfounded, watching the Mask Maker’s hands paint and carve, and felt the tug of purposefulness once more.

“I may do that,” she said. “Thank you.”

He nodded. “My affinity is to the faceless only. But I am not lacking in gratitude.”

“I’m going to see my mother. Is there no one else here? Has anyone come to see you?”

“Lovely Midwife yet persists,” he said, and Hornet’s heart jumped. “Such a fascinating mask she wears! It lies upon her thin as thread. Scarcely concealing at all. She attempted to sup upon me, but our parting was quite amicable.”

“I’ll find her,” she said. “It’s been too long since we’ve spoken.”

“And there is another.”

For once, the chisel’s strike was untrue. It gashed the new mask, removing a long sliver from its façade. The Mask Maker glanced at it, and then bent close, working to correct the blemish.

“Another one long concealed,” he said. “She commissioned me, once. The face beneath had become much malformed, and so the mask required correction. A face, changing a mask…how contrary! How thrilling.” He slathered paint over the gash. “She returned after the kingdom’s unveiling. No commission this time, but a farewell. She spoke of a long labor’s completion. But my own work beckons, nonetheless.”

So there was someone else here, taking refuge in Deepnest’s hollows. It wasn’t hard to believe. Survival in the time of infection had favored those who kept well out of sight, and though Hornet had patrolled the kingdom tirelessly, she couldn’t have glimpsed every survivor. She recalled Emilitia and decided that had probably been a blessing.

“I’ll keep an eye out for them,” she said, and bowed deep. “My best regards to you and your handiwork, Mask Maker.”

Part of her had braced for some passing comment about the little ghost – surely it had visited the Mask Maker as well, this chamber having also appeared on its map. But he had already dismissed her from this world, and returned to whatever one demanded his unending task. For that, too, Hornet was thankful.

* * *

It was both ironic and embarrassing, but since she’d begun her long defense of the infected kingdom, Hornet got lost here more often and more easily than anywhere else in Hallownest. Deepnest was a labyrinth, to be sure, claustrophobic and often pitch-dark, but her loss of direction was mostly because she had seldom returned home. The beasts’ isolation hadn’t spared them from the Festerglow and Hornet was not eager to slay those who had once been so familiar, especially when the mantises were already so adept at it.

Her last visit had been following the little ghost’s trail, shadowing it as it had gormlessly blundered into a trap set by a group of semi-coherent infected (they hadn’t even been natives of the region, for pity’s sake; she’d killed them afterward more out of principle than anything) and gone through the twisting corridors that hosted Herrah’s resting place. The ghost had drawn an ornate nail-hilt that had flared with a lance of prismatic light, and as Hornet had watched on, it had struck the sleeping Herrah with this insubstantial blade. There had been a flash and a brief period of stillness, during which Hornet had moved from her spying-place to the bedside, and then the ghost had moved again and she knew her mother was dead. There had been no drama in it – just a subtle shifting of the atmosphere, an intuition that the seal had been undone. She’d sensed that unraveling magic before she’d noticed that Herrah had stopped breathing.

She hadn’t looked at the little ghost when she’d sent it away. Mute as it was, she had no way of knowing if it reacted to her words or its deed. But it had pattered back the way it had come, that nail-hilt tucked beneath its cloak, and Hornet had stood by the shape that was her mother for a long time, wondering what to feel. She’d struggled to remember. Herrah’s habits, her occasionally brusque speech, the way those stubby limbs would clamber around the chambers of silk with unnatural grace. But the fog of years had swallowed so much. Her past, sacrificed at duty’s altar.

But now here she was again, scuttling through the tunnels, cursing beneath her breath when she hit a dead end. Dirtcarvers littered her path, the deeper recesses shining with the coils of dead Goams. Even the lesser bugs here hadn’t been spared. Maybe those so accustomed to darkness had been burnt out completely by the invasive light.

But Midwife still lived, and that brought Hornet the first spark of actual hope she’d felt since returning from the Black Egg. As a child she’d had few friends – the older Weavers had treated her kindly, but their children could smell the divinity on her and had kept their distance – and Herrah was often preoccupied with matters of state, so Midwife was one of the most constant figures in those early days. She and Herrah were of a similar breed, and Midwife was far more well-traveled and well-read than her role in the nest implied. Her gentle voice echoed through Hornet’s memories, with its stories of the civilizations sequestered to Hallownest’s underbelly: the founding of Deepnest, the Mantid Strife, the tentative ceasefire with the legendarily reclusive Hive. Of distant Pharloom, caged in golden lace, where latticed temples breached misty peaks and even foreign gods went to pilgrimage. She remembered the way Midwife’s mask would sometimes fissure as she talked, exposing the lamprey array of slavering fangs beneath, and that sight had taught her much about both appearances and bravery. Hornet fought the infected hordes for the sake of her mother’s protection, but Midwife occupied her thoughts just as much – worry for her, abandoned here among her poisoned brood, and fear that Hornet’s next venture to this place would find that she had joined them.

Not this time, Hornet thought. She wouldn’t take no for an answer, no matter Midwife’s reasons or appetites. She’d shove as many tiktiks as it took down that maw to keep her from eating the Dirtmouth residents and then leave alongside her. If they parted later, so be it, but she wouldn’t be left to fester here alongside the grieving and the mad.

She was leaving the outer tunnels now, heading into Deepnest’s heart, where the Weavers had held domain. That much was obvious from the runners of gray and dusty silk festooning the stone. It wouldn’t be long before the tunnels opened up into the cocoon chambers, where the younger brood had incubated in better days, and from there was a short jaunt to the Weavers’ village. She’d pay respects to Herrah, make a racket until Midwife showed up, and then convince her to leave, no matter how insufferable Hornet had to be about it.

But someone else was here.

The cocoon chambers were vast, and the merest sight or sound carried far. One such sound was here, vaguely musical, but Hornet couldn’t place the instrument, a low and off-beat wheeze like someone having a tuneful emphysemic fit. It was grating and garish, and somehow unbearably sad.

When Hornet saw the orange light flicking in the distance, she gripped her nail at once, incredulous thoughts of the revived infection dancing through her mind, then peered closer and relaxed. This didn’t have the virulent glow of the Radiance; it was ordinary firelight. Not necessarily a good thing in itself – the webs were tinder-dry, and if a spark should alight on the wrong strand it would turn this whole place into an inferno – but not the end of the world. But as she approached, the figures gathered around that humble flame made her unease flare once more. All strangers, and strange ones at that.

There were three of them, plus two weevil-steeds, and the wagon. Hornet did not like the wagon. It was splintered clapboard, draped in faded red cloth like intestinal lining, and far too large to fit through any of the tunnels leading in or out of this cave, let alone find bearing on the broken and uneven ground. But there it was, upright and whole. Nearest to the wagon was a female bug with a grotesquely bloated lower half that shone in the firelight like wax; half her face was masked, the other half split wide in an expression of delight that looked almost hungering. Furthest from it was a broad-shouldered bug who clenched and worried at a cylindrical contrivance between his hands, the apparent source of that lurching, woeful music. And in the middle was a rail-thin and red-eyed individual – bug? beast? Hornet couldn’t be sure, her thoughts on the matter skittered away from contemplation like grease on a hot frypan – with a scarlet cloak wrapped about him tight as an envelope.

He had turned to regard her as soon as she had entered the light’s circle, and now he spoke. He had an almost lacquered agelessness to his appearance, not so much someone young as someone who’d decided against growing old, but his voice was ancient, a papery rasp that crept into her ears and nested somewhere deep in the meat of her brain. 

“See here,” he said. “A guest has arrived.”

“A guest, a guest!” cried the half-masked bug. “A lovely guest!”

“A lonesome guest,” said the musician.

“A _welcome_ guest.” He swept his cloak aside and grandiloquently bowed. “Before you is the fabled Grimm Troupe, dear madame. I am the eponymous Grimm, while the one serenading us is Brumm, and this vision of beauty here is called Divine. And you are welcome, yes, most welcome to our company.”

Hornet summoned up whatever haughtiness she could manage, prepared to tell this outsider that she could hardly be considered a guest in her own home, but the words shriveled and died somewhere in her throat. That relentless music and the firesmoke had instilled a faint menace in the atmosphere. She glanced over her shoulder, and outside the fire’s flicker was darkness so complete it was almost solid. Like the world had been reduced to this single isle of light.

Grimm kept chatting, apparently heedless to her discomfort.

“Forgive our unpreparedness,” he said. “Under normal circumstances, we would eagerly put on a show certain to astound your mind and refresh your spirit. But we found ourselves summoned to this land unexpectedly.”

“Summoned?” she asked. She should have introduced herself, but speaking had become difficult. Her jaw moved with treacly slowness.

“We come when called,” Brumm said, in his lugubrious voice.

“Was it you, delicious guest?” Divine asked, in her high and hissing one. Hornet could only stare at her mask. It was far more detailed than any she’d seen before (certainly not from the Mask Maker’s chisel), bearing a painted face contorted in a wail of lamentation. It contrasted unpleasantly with the crinkle-eyed joy on its unmasked half. Divine noticed her interest, and her grin widened as she ran a talon down its jagged edge.

“A mask of mourning,” she said. “But mourning breaks. A mourning half-finished!”

“Half-over,” said Brumm.

“Half-done,” said Grimm. “Divine’s taste is immaculate, but her latest choice strikes me as rather inauspicious. I ask you, dear madame-”

“Hornet. My name is Hornet.” Her mind was full of haze, but she’d be damned if she would let this pompous clown condescend to her.

“Hornet! A lovely name. Sharp and pale.” He grinned briefly, exposing a field of glinting fangs. “Hornet, we last arrived in the midst of a terrible malady gripping this place. Would I be wrong to assume that the infection has fled?”

“It was destroyed at the source,” she said.

“Aha! And how long ago was this?”

“No more than a fortnight.”

Brumm’s instrument squealed, the melody tripping over its own feet. Even Grimm looked taken aback. But Divine raised her head and cackled like Hornet had just told an uproarious joke – and now, at last, she noticed the fourth stranger, one who hadn’t warranted an introduction. They sat beside the fire, knees pulled up to their chin.

They were most likely a child, a scrawny miniature of Grimm himself, their own “cloak” little more than a ragged ruff around their shoulders, their bare carapace reflecting the fire’s shine. Limbs so thin it was a wonder they could hold up their own weight, eyes a baleful and arterial red. They were sitting so close they risked getting burnt, but they didn’t even blink as they stared at the flame. Hornet wondered why she had taken so long to notice them. Blinded by the light, maybe.

“It would seem our detour and this kingdom’s condition are intertwined,” said Grimm, looking between his fellows – the weevils also seemed wary, their necks wavering like mushroom-stalks. “A bit of investigation is required.”

“You’ll find little of note,” said Hornet. “Scarcely a handful of bugs still remain. I don’t plan to stay much longer, myself.”

“All the better,” Grimm replied. “When all is emptiness there is room to move. And our scarlet eyes can see quite far.”

“Too right,” said Brumm.

“Too true!” laughed Divine.

Something was very wrong here. Even beyond the presence of the wagon, or dreamlike sopor this troupe had carried with them. It had to do with the light. But whenever she tried to focus on it, her eyes made out the shape of the child and instinctively slid away.

Grimm still kept his distance. It was like there was an invisible boundary between the two of them. But he swept back his cloak and bowed again.

“Good evening to you, Madame Hornet. We shan’t delay you any further. I hope our Troupe did not leave too poor of an impression.” He flourished and looked up to her. “The way behind you should be clear.”

She turned around and saw that the veil of darkness sealing off the world had faded. The shadows there were mundane again. When she looked back to the Troupe she half-expected them to have vanished completely, but there they were, transport and steeds and child.

“Farewell, then,” she said. “Do not linger here any longer than necessary.”

Grimm’s fangs flashed. “Perish the thought.”

“Deepest apologies if my playing is not to your taste, young miss,” Brumm sighed. “Elegies were never my forté.”

She didn’t run. She forced herself not to run. Instead she walked, briskly, until the wrenching death-rattle of that music finally faded, and then flung her needle out and zipped through the remainder of the caves until she reached the far tunnels. She leaned against the wall, caught her breath.

She’d never heard of this “Grimm Troupe” in her life, but something about them had filled her with a foreboding so deep that it had felt like illness. She thought of the leaking darkness at the entrance of the stag station in the Crossroads. Bizarre phenomena, trailing in the wake of the Radiance’s death like after-images.

But after this last stop they wouldn’t be her responsibility anymore. She stepped away from the wall, pushed the thought of them out of her mind, and then froze.

She finally realized it. What about that light had been so wrong. Trying to focus on it had been like staring into the sun, despite its modest size, but in the glimpses she could catch of it, the flame beside which that stiff and silent child knelt had contained neither wood nor coal. It had burned without any fuel at all.

* * *

She came to the end.

In better times, the Weavers’ village had been a beautiful place, scintillating in a way that Hornet was sure would have been wasted on the Pale King’s light-drunk subjects. The Weavers were already equipped with better night-vision than your average bug, and into the threads that made up the dwellings and bridges and decoration of their home, they had expertly knitted in strands of phosphorescence that lent shape and form to their constructions – so that, if you had the right pair of eyes, the village would appear shot through with glittering moonlight. The air had reverberated with the pluck and sigh of the thread that made up their instruments, their libraries filled with records written on their own spun silk (a medium that had proved so effective that even Hallownest had adopted it). Hornet might have led a solitary childhood, but she still kept busy, poking about all these strands, practicing her own weave. She would spin crude and abstract patterns in the air for whichever Weaver could be bothered to stay and watch. They always applauded her, and in at the time she'd thought it was just because she was the child of the Beast, but these days she was inclined to be more charitable towards them. All artistry had an amateurish beginning.

But likewise, all beauty faded. The silk was perishable, and the years of abandonment had not been kind to it. The illumined strands were dead, the musical weaves sagging to worthlessness, the books ruined by dampness or the gnawing of infected beasts. Here, to Hornet, the kingdom’s rot was felt most keenly, and was eager to quit this place before the sight of its decay could taint her memories. She walked through the village, a crimson splotch amidst lifeless gray, making her way to the Beast’s Den – which was not, as its name implied, Herrah’s residence. From the start, it had been intended as her tomb.

All of the Dreamers had kept safeguards around themselves. Lurien had been content with his tower’s dizzying altitude and multitude of locks, Monomon the Teacher had jarred herself behind acid, guardians, and every contrivance that her famous ingenuity could conjure, but Herrah had favored a simpler approach. Nothing, she’d reasoned, could guard Deepnest’s Dreamer better than Deepnest itself. If the beasts fell under Radiance’s sway, then they could vainly batter themselves against her seal until their shells split on it, and anyone cleverer would have a difficult time reaching her through the tunnels without being eaten alive, infection or no infection. So she’d commissioned the Den, a final winding series of passages packed tight as a clenched fist, with the Dreamer’s plinth near its heart. Not a week after its completion, she had gone to the White Palace for the final time, and her retinue had carried her back, asleep now, forever and always.

(Hornet could not remember their final conversation. They had been reduced to careful banalities by then, neither of them willing to open themselves up, expose regrets that could fester later. But they’d embraced. Herrah’s carapace had been cool against Hornet’s mask, and her four arms had dug into Hornet’s back until it hurt. These sensations she wouldn’t surrender to the fog.)

Hornet traced the steps she’d taken when she’d followed the little ghost here. The path was easy to navigate – both of them had chopped up many of the webs on their way in and out, and the only remaining impediment was the occasional dead husk. She felt like an iron filing pulled to a lodestone. The closer she drew to that plinth, the quicker her step.

Then, she stopped. There was whispering in the distance.

Hornet’s needle was already drawn, an automatic gesture. Her body tensed as she took the last few steps to Herrah’s chamber. This wasn’t Midwife she was hearing – the voice, faint as it was, was far older, scratchier, the words coming out in a breathless rush. She couldn’t make out a single syllable, even at this distance.

There was another, the Mask Maker had said, and she doubted that he’d meant Grimm and his coterie. Maybe this was it.

The candles around Herrah’s plinth continued to burn, the wicks enchanted to live on for centuries if need be. Their dim light stained the chamber, Herrah, and the interloper coiled before her. Hornet needed a second to discern its shape – its body was a sinuous, segmented rope like an undernourished garpede, curled upon itself in a spiraling mound, dark as oil. Each segment had its own pair of arms, and the two at its peak were clasped in prayer, just below the bug’s mask. From where Hornet stood, she could only see that mask as a sliver of white, but the moment her gaze fell upon it, the bug’s whispering cut short.

It gasped and convulsed, its body splaying out as it fell back; a candle was almost knocked over in its shock but one of those many hands grasped and steadied it primly even as its owner reeled, holding up still more hands in surrender. Its mask was a cratered ruin from which no face could be discerned, but when it started babbling, louder now, its voice was clear and definitively female.

“Apologies! Forgiveness! It is only pilgrimage, made out of gratitude and love, no harm meant, never intended, _please…”_

“Calm yourself.” Hornet replaced her needle. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

“Oh, thank you. More thanks than I could muster, truly.” She clasped her hands again and bent low. “I don’t think I could bear more unkindness, given or shown. Even gentle Bardoon has rebuffed me, friend of many years…but no, I won’t trouble you with it. No violence, in this sacred place.”

“What do you call yourself?” she asked.

“A name? Yes. It can be Rhea.” Her talons clittered against her mask. “The sound is familiar enough.”

This was not a conventional way to respond to such a simple question, but Hornet wasn’t put out by it. She’d already seen more than her share of eccentrics in the last day or so. And while Rhea was deceptively large (her mask the size of Herrah’s own, and if fully uncoiled she may have stretched across half this room), her furtive, scraping pose showed no hint of a threat.

“Have you also come to pay your respects?” Rhea asked. “To the Dreamers? To the departed?”

“I have,” she said. “What is your relation to them?”

“Only in spirit. Never did I see them living, but I beheld their works, yes. All is remembered.” She uncoiled further, with unsettling, fluid speed, her head rising to the chamber’s ceiling, and then scuttled to the plinth, arms all spread wide. “Such wondrous figures. Marvelous in life, untouchable in sleep, and immaculate in death. Do you see? Not a speck of rot! The seal is broken, but time yet passes them by. Such brilliant magics the usurper-King wielded.”

Rhea descended on Herrah like a fishing-line until their masks almost touched, unaware that Hornet was clenching her fists. Hornet didn’t speak her mind – this bug was clearly insane even by the standards of the infection’s survivors, and trying to rebuke her would likely be pointless – but hearing this praise of the King’s plot made her eye twitch, to say nothing of how _intimate_ Rhea was being with her mother’s corpse. Then she noticed Rhea’s injuries, the gouged shell and missing arms.

“Have you been injured?” she asked.

Rhea finally turned away from Herrah, holepocked mask shuddering. “Attacked yes, injured no. But it was an accident, I never…” She looked at her stumps as if seeing them for the first time. “Oh. You misunderstand. These marks were from sacrifice fairly made. I’ve heard it said that a prolonged life is a diminished one, but with skill and wisdom, the nature of that diminishment may be negotiated.” She tittered, a sound like breaking glass. “And the usurper-King’s afterglow alleviated my plight. For that and for shelter, for his initial banishment of light so hot and hateful, I am eternally…”

She stopped, cleared her throat, and backed away from the plinth. The picture of deference now, half her hands beckoning Hornet forward, the other half directing her to Herrah.

“I do ramble on,” she said. “A consequence of solitude. You are here to pay your respects, not endure my prattling. Please, come.”

She retreated from the candlelight and merged with the shadows in the room’s outer periphery – and “merged” was the right word for it, her silhouette becoming indistinguishable from that dark until only her mask remained, floating disembodied. Hornet gave it a wary look before stepped forward and up to the plinth. There was nothing unexpected here. Herrah lay in repose, arms folded, the candles painting her mask with weak color. Hornet put a hand to her cold chest and felt very little. Her grieving, if it could be called such, had been dealt with on her last visit here.

“You approach with such familiarity,” Rhea said, almost in awe.

Hornet didn’t respond. She stared at the mask, marking its details. This would be the last time she would gaze on it. She wanted it to be remembered, whatever may come.

“What did you know of this Dreamer?” Rhea asked. “Did you also shelter in her domain?”

She also wanted this woman to shut up. “I was familiar with her. In the days before the seal.”

“Before…the seal? You were there at its creation?”

“Not in person. But yes. I was privy to some of its secrets.”

Silence at that. But the back of Hornet’s neck prickled, and she turned to see Rhea’s mask grow closer, swaying like a lantern on a chain, the body behind still swallowed by dark.

“I have searched,” she said, her voice gone eerily soft and smooth. “Every home and every head, at every waking minute…and all minutes were waking for me, in those dreamless days. I scoured the acid-writing of the Archives, tunneled through the refuse beneath the grand capital, for these answers. For Dreamer knowledge.”

She drew nearer still. Hornet’s instincts were now shrieking for her to grasp her needle but her limbs were unresponsive. The holes in that mask, their number and configuration, seemed to change every time she blinked.

“Only my homeland lay untouched by my scavenging,” Rhea said. “Locked as it was behind usurper-King’s brand. I could have broken it easily, of course, but it would have been an act of inconceivable disrespect. With Festerglow’s death I found the door open wide, and returned to the corpse-strewn dark, and found nothing. But that was expected, and all preparations have been made.” She reached out to Hornet. “Have I glimpsed you before, flitting about? If only I had known. But I am glad for our meeting here. I must see for myself. If there is something to be gleaned, the least speck…oh, worry not. It is quite harmless, and over so quickly."

Those holes leaked smoky shadow, yawning impossibly wide. Then Rhea spoke a word like a fingertip running across old meat, and Hornet fell in.

Here now open hole ensconced in fever pulsation and hole appears from needle-pierce the cracks around the hole are black the eyes before they shut are black the egg cocooned in chains is black the black is black as black. Face rises from roiling black sea with black hole black eyes and those small hands so still and stiff. _They were not they shivered and shook it was afraid and I said nothing._ Falling faster needle’s silver pierces the black and the days made black by feverglow unleashed by needle-pierce. Threads woven round the needle bearing her through black days. _How many years has it been. How many to come._ Pulse of endless wet the wet that dripped from threads tied bound round her and all of them tied too tight. Black-eyed bodies flitting past and their eyes they will not shut. Dead in mounds. The burial years. _Mother what is becoming of me._ The buried years belching up their black and all threads broken and she continues to tumble. Needle gripped in hands on black threshold slick with wet from the dead in mounds. Needle presented. Bound in thread. _Mother what do you expect of me._ Bound by Mother. Bindings tighten. The black pierced by thread and a black mound looming. Caressed by arms like needles. The smiling mask and how it would break to reveal the-

Rhea’s horrified gasp wrenched her out of the darkness like a fish from deep water and she fell over at once as if the body beneath her chitin had been liquefied. She lay numbly on her side and every breath burned her raw throat; she dimly realized that she had been screaming. Rhea clutched at herself, quavering all over, long fingers digging through shell and into her meat.

“You,” she whispered. “You were his…and _hers…_ I forget myself, I never should have…” She frantically looked skyward as if expecting a lightning strike, and then scampered for the exit. “Forgive me. _Forgive me!”_

Hornet could not forgive, or move, or speak. Her mind thundered still with dredged memory, all of it raked by those grasping hands. She lay there, insensate as the sound of Rhea’s retreat faded, until a softer dark bore her away.

* * *

_The Weavers were social creatures. They had to be – a maverick weft could disrupt a song, a home, a vital piece of load-bearing, so they worked and rested as one, and this was especially clear in their public spaces, which would have been quite unrecognizable as such to the bugs who lived up above. The Weavers had little need for benches and chairs; they spun their own furniture, and there were many patches of open air around their village where the cross-hatchings of thread ran especially thick, places where they could sit, stretch, and chat about their next grand undertaking. Very rarely did a Weaver relax alone. But Hornet had always been different._

_She sat at the edge of town, on a web that hung underneath many of the dens, and her feet dangled over the shallow black lake on the cavern floor far below. Her needle was in her lap and she wiped it down with slow, careful strokes – she was still new to this process, and it had to be repeated carefully, so that the steps would later become automatic with no gap for mistakes. Cloth was easy to come by, and certain varieties of mushrooms, when picked and squeezed, produced an acceptable oil. The metal’s pale shine was a thin cut in the surrounding gloom._

_Something else approached. She was deep in concentration and didn’t notice the delicate vibrations of the web until the newcomer was almost on top of her. An oblong and white-capped shape that moved with surpassing gentleness for something of its size. It settled, and took its place beside Hornet, the web-strand dipping appreciably under its weight._

_Neither of them spoke. The silence was filled only by the rhythmic hiss of the cloth. At last Hornet raised the needle, examined it, set it down again, and put the cloth away._

_“Satisfied?” Herrah asked._

_“A weapon is worthless if poorly maintained,” said Hornet._

_“The same could be said for its wielder. Supper was an hour ago.”_

_Hornet looked up in surprise, but Herrah’s gaze was trained on the darkness past the village’s edge. Her traitorous stomach chose that exact moment to growl._

_“I apologize,” she said. “I must have lost track of time.”_

_“That does tend to happen, doesn’t it?” Herrah said, but her voice was good-natured. “I remember when I had to practically drag you away from weaving lessons.”_

_When you were around, neither of them added._

_“Anyway,” she went on, “diligence is a fine thing, but don’t lose yourself in training too deeply.”_

_“I’ll try, Mother. But I still have a long way to go.”_

_“Such harsh self-criticism. I’m told your progress has been remarkable. You have some of the older Weavers practically in tears, you know. They can’t remember the last time one of these were made, let alone wielded.” She carefully poked the needle’s gleaming tip. “It’s a weapon inseparable from their culture. I doubt Hallownest has ever seen its like.”_

_Hornet pulled it away from her, the least fraction. “I’ll treat it well. This is the reason I was born, after all.”_

_Herrah’s mask tilted. “How so?”_

_“I remember Midwife’s stories,” she said quietly. “Of the Hive, and the rival tribes from which they fled. The hornets, especially. Fierce warriors, with stingers so great they could be used as blades in themselves. That’s what I was named for, wasn’t it?” She stared at the sliver of her reflection in the weapon’s hilt. “Hornet. A needle cursed with a mind.”_

_Somewhere, a piece of stone broke off from an ancient stalactite and fell into the lake. Dark water rippled._

_“That’s an interesting interpretation,” Herrah said mildly. “And here I just thought the word sounded charming.”_

_“I’m in no mood for jests, Mother.”_

_“I’m sorry,” she said. “But I wish you had spoken to me about this earlier. Because you_ are _wrong.”_

_The circumstances of her birth were something she’d been thoroughly educated on, but she had never dared to ask the question that lurked underneath it. If she did, it would itself birth answers that she knew would be vicious and bristling with stingers. But the air was full of premonitions, and Herrah’s excursions to the White Palace were becoming more frequent. If the seal had to be placed, then things would happen very quickly. They might not have another chance._

_“Then tell me,” she said. “Why am I here?”_

_Herrah sighed, slumped. She suddenly appeared old. “You were correct about the origin, at least. Vespa had some tentative contact with us before walling herself off in that dreary hive, and I learned of the hornet tribes from her. As a name, it bears a heavy weight, though not a malign one. Hornets are vicious warriors, yes. But also fierce protectors.”_

_“And what would you have me protect?”_

_“Whatever you deemed worthy, I suppose. There’s a whole world to choose from.”_

_“I care nothing for the world,” she said._

_“And that was your choice. One that we’ve all respected. What will you do, then, should the seal fail and all become lost? Haunt this little village until your weapon grows blunt and tarnished?”_

_“Don’t play ignorant,” she said. “My task was laid out before me at the start. To defend you and the other Dreamers.”_

_“Your task.” She spoke it like a punchline. “If the infection should emerge again, I doubt there will be anyone who could enforce it. Duty alone cannot bind you, Hornet. It makes for a weak thread.”_

_“If you think so little of the seal then why volunteer for it?” Now her voice was rising, against her best efforts. “We can leave! Surely the Weavers could cope with abandoning Deepnest if it means you’d be saved. And to hell with the King’s curse, I doubt it’s even real to begin with…”_

_“I will not. The bargain must be upheld.”_

_“Then_ why?!” _The word echoed across the webbing. “Everyone here speaks of you as though you’re already gone. It won’t be much longer before that damned King takes you away from me- from Deepnest for good. What choice do I have but to keep this weapon sharp for when that day finally comes? This is all I have.” She looked back to the needle and gripped it like a throat. “I’m your blade.”_

_Herrah’s arms reached out and curled around her. For a moment she thought of throwing them off, storming into the tunnels, sulking until someone came to find her, but she couldn’t. In these uncertain times, if she left now, there was the slim but horrible possibility it would be the last they would ever see each other._

_Herrah asked, “Do you know why the Hive sealed itself off?”_

_“History lessons now?” she said bitterly. “It’s the same as us. They despised Hallownest.”_

_“Broadly true. But they objected to it on a more existential level. The bees are fatalistic creatures. The notion of an ‘eternal kingdom’ offended them deeply.” She gazed up, as if seeing past the layers of stone and into the soaked and bustling metropolis above. “Everything passes, they said, and of course I suspected as much myself. But I couldn’t be sure. When the Pale King approached us, I found my chance.”_

_“What chance?”_

_“To see Hallownest and its monarch plain. In all their glory and fragility.” Her tone was only half-sardonic. “And fragile they were. The Pale King is the foundation of his kingdom, and he is not as immutable as his sycophants claim. There is deep weakness there. These nests, their little lives…they all must end sometime, to this foul infection or some other cause. But I wanted something good to arise from them. So that all this folly could be justified.” She laughed a little. “Arrogant of me, don’t you think? But that was you, Hornet.”_

_She would not allow Herrah to feel her shoulders shake. “You expect too much of me.”_

_“Those expectations have already been met. For years, I worried that you’d be crushed under the burden of your heritage. You have to admit that you were a rather_ stern _child.” Hornet could not dispute this. “Just know that, someday, whatever tethers you to this place will also break. And when that time comes, I hope you can find a place that is worthy of you.”_

_Silence. Then Hornet took the needle up and edged closer to Herrah, so that her shoulder rested against her mother’s side. She always felt so small when they were this close together._

_“You said the King was weak. What is his weakness?” she asked._

_“It’s simple, really,” Herrah said. “He loves us all. And more than anything, he fears that his love will be unrequited.”_

_The water below roiled. She’d cast all the Palace’s letters down there, until the stark white vellum was swallowed up by black. “Then let him be afraid. But I’ll protect you. Whatever happens, whatever it takes.”_

_Herrah didn’t say anything to that, but she didn’t have to. Hornet could feel the last thread cinch tight around her heart._

_It wasn’t their final conversation together, but it was the last one of any significance. She broke her promise to take care of herself. Instead she trained until her chitin felt like it might crack, and the Weavers constructed their own protections against the encroaching plague of light. Then came the final missive, and even the King's retainers had shed their arrogance; they would have cut off their own arms and offered them to the Beast if it meant cooperation. But she went quietly, and Hornet watched her go, and thought nothing of her distant father or his doomed endeavors. Her little world frayed. The worst was yet to come._

* * *

Hornet emerged by inches, the pall of shadow over her eyes slowly falling away, and finally groaned and sat up, rubbing her mask. Her body ached, but that was probably just a result of lying on the cold stone floor, and it didn’t hold a candle to the thudding pain in her head. Her thoughts still felt sludgy and slow as if she’d been recently concussed. The candle-flames made her wince as she tried to get her bearings.

One of these shadows were darker than the others. She stiffened, hand going to her needle, and then stopped. The shadow was another bug, bulbous and white-masked, but the face etched upon it was clear and familiar.

“Hornet,” said Midwife. “Are you well?”

Hornet stood straight, prepared to greet her, but the words died on her lips. Midwife lay on her side with legs splayed out, amorphous as a slug, her breathing shallow. She was wounded, a sizable puncture in her skin that bled smoldering shadow. Not unlike the dark that had spilled from Rhea’s mask, before it had sucked her in and violated her memories.

She ran to Midwife and knelt beside her, hands hovering uselessly over the wound. Midwife chuckled weakly.

“Not a word of greeting?” she asked. “Is that any way to treat your old caretaker?”

“I’m fine. But you…what happened? What can I do?”

“A stranger entered our domain. I spied it crawling about, headed for the Den, and hunger perhaps compelled me to be over-enthusiastic in my defense. I must have startled it.” One leg feebly pawed at her injury. “What an odd creature it was. I heard it begging forgiveness as I fled.”

“It was _her_ ,” Hornet spat. “I found her desecrating this place. She invaded my _mind_ , somehow.”

“So that’s what it was. I had taken refuge in the village but thought I heard your voice, crying out.”

“She’ll pay for this. After you’re healed. Let me know what you need, I can make a poultice…”

“For this wound, at least, she cannot be blamed. Not rightly. She never laid a hand on me, you know. It was only sound and pain.” Her head lolled, the neck unable to bear its weight. “I always knew my appetite would be my undoing.”

She had no experience with an injury like this. If she peered through that bleeding shadow then she saw no interruption in the skin itself. It was like Rhea’s attack had broken through into Midwife’s very soul. She frantically pored through her memories for someone with experience in these injuries. The Nailsage, the snail shaman, there had to be someone who could staunch it. Midwife’s head angled towards her, and with effort, she caressed the side of Hornet’s mask.

“There’s nothing to be done,” she said. “It goes far deeper than it looks. I feel it festering in me.”

She pulled away. “I won’t abandon you here.”

“It’s for the best. At least I was able to see that horrible light finally go dim. But now there is no queen, no children…such an awful silence.” Her arm fell limp again. “I had hoped that maybe some of them would live, after they were cured. But they must have been tired, too.”

“Stop talking like that!” Her voice had begun to splinter. “I came here to get you. We’re going to leave this wretched kingdom together, do you hear me? You didn’t spend all those years in this place just to die now!”

But Midwife had gone still, and now Hornet’s own breath quickened; she went to her head and rose it up, that fissured mask inches from her own. It split open, and the fanged horror inside smiled at her.

“Look at you,” Midwife said. “You grew up so fine. Herrah’s smugness at all this would have been unbearable, I’m sure.” She laughed. “She was right about you. Right about everything, in the end.”

And with that, Midwife let out a final shuddering exhalation, and her eyes all closed. The weight of her became too much for Hornet to hold. Midwife’s head lowered to the ground, mask still split, her teeth glinting in the candlelight like flecks of mica.

“Don’t do this,” Hornet said. She wanted to shout but couldn’t get enough air. “Not you, too.”

But no answer came. Even the wound had stopped oozing, its work done. Hornet laid her hands on Midwife’s corpse and looked up at the darkness in the chamber’s upper recess, hanging like a thunderhead. She tried to weep, knew it was only appropriate, but no matter how long she stayed there or how many memories she dredged up of the two guardians whose bodies now flanked her, the tears wouldn’t come.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Fanart for this chapter provided by luminyan.](https://emberchii.tumblr.com/post/627092629562195968/sometimes-you-just-really-like-a-fic-and-decide-to)

Rhea fled. As Hornet lay there in her troubled sleep, with the shadows of her dead mother and fatally injured caretaker intersecting across her supine form, Rhea lurched and seized and spasmed through the fungal murk of Deepnest, the twisted rope of her body lashing like a beheaded fluke. She moved with that same uncanny speed but whatever hands didn’t scrabble for purchase on the rock beat and clawed at her carapace, an unconscious flagellation that didn’t stop even when she began to leave clots of oil-dark fluid in her wake. Her breath was ragged, broken up in the same flood of hysterical whispering speech that Hornet had overheard on her approach to Herrah’s grave, and more than once her voice sounded close to sobbing.

She reached the disused tramline connecting Deepnest to the Ancient Basin, continued past the tram itself and shoved herself into the tunnel, a smooth-carved artery of a passage that was thoroughly lined with more of those shadow-smoldering glyphs. The acoustics here were excellent, enough to pick up her speech and magnify it into something coherent:

“Invader, intruder, relic, wretch, what have you done. Thief, defiler, ingrate, rapacious slime, slothful beast, monster, _monster_. Broken outcast from a time better left dead, scuttling contaminant, vile traitor of highest order and lowest character, betrayer of protectors and saviors and hosts, what have you done? What have you done? _What have you done?”_

She had tarried. Tarried, and indulged, and gorged herself on the spectacle of the lightless kingdom, and this was what her indulgence had wrought. In her senseless greed she had ripped open the mind of Hallownest’s last royal and dredged her memories like river-silt, and in sifting through that refuse – Hornet, her name was Hornet, and she had absorbed a lifetime of sadness in selfless duty, and her screams still tore at Rhea far worse than her own talons – she had collided with a fond memory, the looming face of the very same bug she’d struck out against not long before. There was a chance this bug could yet live, but Rhea’s arts were potent, and the sight of that rushing and amorphous shape studded with snapping teeth had compelled her to strike true. She had done the unthinkable twice over.

The pain of her self-inflicted wounds had begun to make itself known. She moved slower, whimpering as her hands ran across this fresh mutilation. She wanted so badly to exit this tunnel and descend further into the roiling black sea, to soothe herself in the familiar.

But no. She couldn’t dawdle any longer, lest her blundering invite more catastrophe into Hallownest’s remnants. The work must be completed.

The tunnel was nearly at its end. In the distance could be seen the depleted sepia light of the Ancient Basin, empty now except for the blindly crawling shadow-creepers, whose minds had been so simple that even the Radiance’s end had barely paused their sad procession. From here she would continue to Kingdom’s End, and the great corpse’s ceaseless rot. She would not say her farewells to Bardoon. It was clear that her presence pained him, as it did everything else in this land. She loved it so, but it was never hers.

Rhea stopped, her mask raised up as if she was scenting the air. But it wasn’t odor she detected – a foreign vibration had entered the tunnel, undetectable by mundane senses, but enough to make the cauls of dark across her glyphs ripple. Her hands clattered nervously on the stone as she turned this way and that, trying to detect its source.

Then, the shapes appeared. Gleaming whiteness etched into the air, like fireflies twisted into ammonite curls. Spirals. They multiplied. They shivered around her. Rhea’s own shape coiled defensively into itself in a dark imitation of the spirals that now filled the tunnel, and before she could act further the shapes all _twisted_ , a single hard turn that seemed to revolve the world around their axis, and then burst in a single hard flash that made her yowl and try to cover all her mask-holes with several dripping hands; there was a moment of punishing vertigo, and when her vision returned, she found herself in a place quite different from where she’d been.

At first she thought that she had somehow returned to the Abyss, with its familiar geography now choked with monuments of corpses. She was surrounded by blind and disembodied masks, crusting the walls, mounted on poles, and chitin crunched beneath her as she fought to get her bearings. But the darkness here, while considerable, brought her no comfort.

A lilting voice emerged from the shadows – all of them, everywhere at once, including right beside her ear.

“Did you like my little spell? Pioneered by my great-grandfather, the jolly old heretic. Our kind may be confined to these barrows, but he saw nothing wrong in bringing the occasional trifle _to_ him every now and then. It has some origin in the moths’ arts, you know. Acolytes of the wrathful Radiance. How ironic that I should finally decide to use it now. Hoho.”

It chuckled, and the hanging masks shuddered weakly in sympathy.

“Heresy troubles me not,” it said. “Our tribe’s spiraling ways ensnare all knowledge within their vortex, propriety be damned. Within it lies the arts of Soul, of Dream, of Weave, even of Pale…but not _yours._ You were well-hidden, always.”

The darkness receded a bit. Not far from her was a small hut like a raised ribcage, and two dim points flared in its depths. The masks crunched as its resident emerged, a creature of almost featureless shadow that was granted shape only by those eyes, and its necklace of delicate skulls, and the shell-headdress that clung to it like a slurping parasite. It gripped its staff in both hands and bowed deeply.

“Abyssal one,” said the shaman. “I bid you welcome to my humble barrow.”

“You know of me?” Rhea asked.

“Only the very faintest edge. I did say you were well-hidden.” The shaman’s eyes crinkled in delight. “I was an accomplished scryer in times long past, before my environs were swallowed in the moth-goddess’ outraged screams and blinding light. With the cessation of both, I detected that a new magic had suffused Hallownest, subtle and dark. It did not scream. It _whispered._ I had to find its origin! I searched and searched, and finally detected the pulse of something most unsavory within Deepnest. And from there…” He clapped his hands. “I do apologize for the suddenness of this invitation. But my kind has never been known for its politeness. Hoho. May I at least have the pleasure of learning your name?”

She cringed away from him. Especially now of all times, someone who was genuinely happy to meet her struck an unnatural chord. But the shaman’s cheerfulness did not appear feigned.

“Rhea,” she said, and as always, the name sounded wrong in the gnarled tube of this throat – her old one, whatever it had been, had sunk into her memory beyond all dredging. “And what do you call yourself, shaman?”

“Our names are used only among family, and alas, that is one taboo I am unwilling to break. ‘Shaman’ will do nicely. Especially as I now appear to be the last of my kind in this land.” He didn’t sound too troubled by this. “Though one of my aunts did theorize that we snails are distantly related to the Void-born. She always was on the dotty side.”

Rhea’s head tilted. “The shell you wear stirs some familiarity within me, though I could not say. It has been long since I was able to revisit my homeland.”

“Is that so.” The shaman drummed a finger on his staff. “Would your retreat happen to coincide with the arrival of the Moth Tribe?”

“It would.” A note of resentment, bitter as arsenic, crept into her voice. “And their burning dream-goddess.”

He clapped again. “I knew it! If only my aunt could hear…ah, and my condolences to yourself, as well.”

“It is all right.” And it was – sinking into the past once again had comforted her. She found purchase on the substrate of skulls that made up the barrow floor. “The Abyss is not limited to this single kingdom. It is a continuum, a churning sea beneath the skin of the world. It endures, even if my kin did not. They turned to cinders in the presence of that Radiance.” Her hands all clasped. “I remember them still. I remembered them as I fled to the lifeless wastes, and when I returned to find them banished by paler light, already diminished. A gentle, preserving glow. For it and its usurper-King, I have the deepest thanks.”

“He was beloved.” The shaman’s voice had turned solemn. “Had you returned while he still lived, I’m sure that you would have been accepted beneath his aegis, though he profaned your old realm most severely.”

“Yes. I know of the history. Plumbed every corner for its trace. His faded light granted me time.” The broken, burnt stumps of her arms weakly flexed as if in assent. “I have a labor to complete. I thank you for this meeting, but it has already taken me out of my way. I must be off.”

“Oho. I’m sure you must.”

The shaman waved his hand dismissively, and all the skulls clacked together, once. That hard dry note made her twitch. The air had acquired a hostile tang, like the scent of a hissing fuse.

“Know that I have the most profound respect for all things Void-born,” he said. “Your arts formed the basis of our understanding of Soul, just as your black seas lurk beneath the foundations of our world. Any bug of a mystical bent would be quite bereft without you. However.” The mask impaled atop his staff glared down at her like an inquisitor. “I find myself unnerved by the darkness with which you have suffused this kingdom. I must ask your intent.”

“I mean no harm,” she whispered.

“And I believe you. In fact, I find you a most stimulating conversation partner. It’s a shame that we could not have met sooner. Will you tell me?”

She nodded, eagerly. “You know of the seal used to lock away the Radiance, yes?”

“Glimpses of it, and only recently,” said the shaman. “In my scrying, I peered into the terrible black beneath the palace ruins. Those endless corpses in the semblance of our King…”

“Yes. I do not begrudge or blame him for that sacrifice. The construction of a hollow Vessel to seal the Radiance, and the Dreamers to seal the Vessel. I searched, so painstakingly, for the knowledge of that ritual. But it seems there is only one who can grant me this wish.” She reared up and spread her arms wide, mask tilted back in rapture. “I will call him forth.”

The shaman went still. Even the swaying of his necklace ceased. Then he raised his staff high and slammed it down and the myriad skulls lining his barrow chattered and rattled, an ossuaric chorus at once outraged and hungering, and from the empty pits of their eyes flared dim points of light that connected and intersected until the entire chamber was encased in a glimmering net; Rhea whirled and saw the exit also webbed off and when she dashed toward it she struck empty space that gave perhaps an inch of elastic yield and then no more. She turned back. The air around the shaman wavered like heat-haze, an eldritch fog of latent Soul.

“Unkindness,” she said, voice breaking. “Always unkindness. What have I done wrong?”

“Someone with your knowledge, asking such an obvious question?” The shaman’s voice was still bright, but now it was bright like a razorblade’s edge. “You’ve gone even madder than I’d feared.”

“I said I meant no harm. I spoke it truly. I desire only preservation and sleep.” She scraped at the ground before him, several of her eyeholes leaking a dark and lymphatic fluid. “And such gifts would follow in its wake. Recompense to this kingdom, for everything it’s given me. Please, I do not want to fight!”

“That’s a pity. Because I lack the rhetorical skills to convince you to stop.” The cloud above the shaman sparked blue. “You and I could simply remain here for eternity, I suppose. The barrier I’ve erected around this chamber calls forth the inherited might of my ancestors. It does not break unless I will it.”

Rhea glanced again at the sealed exit. Her pocked mask met the shaman’s eyes, she made a complicated gesture with two of her hands, and the entire web vanished as quickly and quietly as a blown candle.

The shaman’s eyes widened. He almost lost his grip on his staff.

“A gossamer thing,” she said. “I could have dispelled your ‘invitation’ just as easily, but I was in a rather harried frame of mind. I beg you to reconsider, shaman. I may have already taken one life today. Do not compound my guilt.” She twitched suddenly, wracked by realization. “Perhaps…yes, there could even be atonement for my crime. The princess’ loneliness, alleviated. Deep down, she must want to meet her-”

A bolt of sizzling light burst from the hazy air and struck the ground just beside Rhea. Several masks were reduced to crumbling charcoal. The shaman chuckled, though there was a ragged edge to it.

“Your confidence is not unearned,” he said. “But if you believe I’m so easily cowed, then you understand very little indeed. Even if you flee, I’ll pull you back, again and again. You shall not complete this task while I still draw breath.”

Rhea sighed. She drew herself up to her full height Another bolt lanced toward her but she flicked a finger and zagged away, bursting into sparks beside the exit like a swarm of lumaflies. The shaman’s knees buckled; in that moment of illumination, her shadow had fallen on him like weight.

“So be it,” she said. “But you, too, will be remembered.”

* * *

Dirtmouth had begun as an improvisational community, the huts constructed by newcomers either too cautious or too poor to start a life in the Pale King’s lands beneath, and though it had eventually thrived in its humble way, it had remained untidy – the huts built with no real plan in mind, homes and shops indistinguishable except for a scrawled sign or two. It had certainly never granted itself the dignity of a village square; the closest it came was the bench and vacant space around the old well. But not too far from that spot was another empty patch that the huts crowded around like dancers avoiding a sticky spot on a ballroom floor, and over the last couple of weeks, the dusty earth there had been trod flat by two pairs of scrabbling feet.

Oro and Mato circled each other, nails at the ready. It would have been quite impossible for anyone to tell them apart through the clouds of shifting dust, though one had a constant low growl emerging from deep in his throat, while the other’s shoulders had a certain insouciant tilt. They were both filthy and their cloaks were tattered and slashed, but over these days of sparring neither of them had sustained any injuries beyond minor bruising, and those hadn’t been inflicted by their nails. Still, when rushed at each other, the growling Oro did so with killing intent.

The dying sunlight winked bloody off his nail’s arc as he swiped, feinted, backed off and thrusted again, but Mato deflected, their nails scraping edge-on-edge until the hilts locked and their masks were almost close enough to touch.

“Your technique is sloppy as ever,” Oro spat.

“Sufficient to handle you, it would seem,” said Mato. “Remember to breathe, brother. You look rather wan.”

Oro cursed and broke away, heels skidding trenches through the dirt; he dropped back, hunched, braced his nail at his side. A familiar pose, and one that got Mato’s attention. He huffed and entered a defensive position as Oro _blurred_ , dashing with nail out, an annihilating swipe that could cleave one of these shabby houses clean off their foundation-

-and then he stopped dead in mid-attack, so that for a time, the only movement was that of the sifting dust.

Through the clouds a tiny and pop-eyed shape could be seen with an upraised tree branch in one hand. It had gently tapped the inside of Oro’s wrist, and that gesture had been sufficient to lock him in place. Sly stood there like a butler observing a streak of dung on the foyer carpet, long enough for sweat to bead around the frozen brothers’ palms. Their animosity against each other hadn’t diminished at all with time, and it made itself known in their sparring, but Sly’s presence snuffed it out instantly. He spoke loudly, and carried a small but very sturdy stick.

Oro remained still as Sly huffed and began to walk. He circled the warrior, prodding his elbow, his shin, the small of his back. With every poke, both Oro and Mato winced as if they’d been shot with crossbow bolts.

“Enough,” Sly said, and Oro dropped his pose and stood to attention. “What have I told you about anger, Oro?”

“That it must temper, never harden,” Oro recited woodenly.

“And yet your grudge still insinuates itself in your every movement. It renders you stiff, unyielding. Brittle. If you ever ventured out of that ashy little hovel and into a world of proper warriors, you would crack like glass.” He walked up to Mato. “Whereas I notice that you, Mato, hold your nail tenderly as a lover.”

Mato bowed. “Thank you, Master. I endeavor to-”

Sly hopped up and cracked the stick against the side of Mato’s head hard enough to send him into the dirt. Despite himself, Oro flinched and cupped his own mask in sympathy.

“A nail is not your lover, you sentimental oaf!” Sly shouted. “It is a _hideous tool_ for separating bugs from their vital fluids. Show it proper respect, or be cut down by someone who has!”

Sly had become the de-facto leader of the Dirtmouth refugees. It wasn’t a hard decision to make – in his prime, the Nailsage could have outfought an entire squadron of the Pale King’s finest without breaking a sweat, and in his retirement, Sly the Merchant had a better head for supplies and logistics than even seasoned travelers like Iselda and Cornifer. It wasn’t as if the villagers needed much leadership anyway, so Sly left them to themselves, and instead devoted his efforts to making his erstwhile apprentices wish that their fingers had never brushed a hilt.

Oro and Mato were both aware of the Radiance’s defeat, though they hadn’t intended to let it change their routines, staying in their dusty old dojos and further honing their skills. But then Sly had materialized in their doorways, a pint-sized vision of wrath with Sheo affably waving at them from behind, and instructed them to come to Dirtmouth at once. Mato had meekly obeyed. Oro, on the other hand, was determined to stay put, had even challenged Sly for the right to remain in his home. Sly had paused at this, left the doorway, returned with the same petrified stick he now held, and accepted. Their duel had commenced. Seconds later, Oro lay in a twitching heap with his nail embedded in the cave ceiling, and the issue had thusly been settled.

The atmosphere around the two brothers had been subzero – almost enough to freeze out Sheo completely, though Mato did ask for an explanation as to the Nailsmith’s presence in their little group, and Sheo had said that he was here for a commission and then fell coyly silent. But nothing thawed between Oro and Mato themselves. Their grudge had long since passed into myth, beyond the constraints of a single mere event, and become its own justification; for either brother to stop antagonizing the other would be an admission of defeat. Sly hadn’t asked for them to make up, or inquired after their health or skill during their long seclusion. He’d just set them to sparring, day in, day out, watching intently all the while (though not always visible, which just made things worse; Mato had begun surreptitiously eyeing dark corners of his room when he lay down to sleep). He seldom had a kind word to say about their form. And they were getting exhausted of fighting each other.

“Up you go,” said Sly to Mato, and he rose, groaning. “Five minutes’ rest, and then begin again. Oro, I want to see proper follow-through the next time you utilize the dash slash, and keep your elbows raised.”

“And if I refuse?” Oro asked.

Sly turned, slowly. Mato stayed on his knees; he now looked like he wanted to tunnel a hole into the earth and hide in it.

“My tutelage is not compulsory,” Sly said. “Yet here you are.”

“After you thrashed me.”

“You stated that you would follow me if I won, did you not?”

“Enough semantics,” said Oro. “If this is some ploy to make us reconcile, then it’s a futile one. I was perfectly content where I was. And that must have also been true for _him_ , if you had to drag him out of that asinine cave in the Howling Cliffs. The altitude must not have done his wits any favors.”

“Nor that corpse-choked air for yours,” Mato said, and then Sly glanced back at him and he hunched low and shut up.

“The way you two treat each other has always brought me distress,” Sly said. “But more concerning still is what has become of your talents. I’d allowed myself to believe that after you drifted apart, you’d at least have time and focus to hone yourselves, but I should have known better. You’ve stagnated just as this kingdom did. Sat around nursing your insecurities, while your form did not advance one inch. How many years do you think you’ve wasted?” Neither of them answered. “When I heard the Old Light’s death-bellows, I took up my weapon for the first time in an age, and returned emboldened. The time has come for change. I at least wished to see what changes had come over the two of you, but you’ve disappointed me.”

“Then what would you propose?” Oro said acidly. “Start toying with paints like Sheo has?”

“If it pleases you,” Sly said. “Better that than a merchant. You’d make for sorry competition.”

“Do not _jest_ with me, Nailsage!” Oro took a step forward. Sly took a step forward. Oro hastily took a step back.

“Point your nail at the thing you seek,” he said. “Or brush, or hammer, or beautiful, glimmering geo. The focus that shall carve your path through the world.” He swung his stick to the thin line of horizon that gashed the dry earth, the bleeding skies. “Where have your nails been pointed? To each other? To yourselves? Or have they just lain idle, pointing at the comfortable, rotting husk of this kingdom, where you could remain sullen and unchallenged?”

To his credit, Oro was able to hold his stare for a few seconds more, but then it dropped to his feet. Mato had already succumbed; he sat cross-legged in the dust, bowed in shame. Sly shook his head and turned away.

“Our time together will end very soon,” he said. “While my new path in life may seem unglamorous to you – and if it does, you should see my geo stockpile! – it remains mine, ever advancing. I would like us to part ways knowing that you will do the same.”

He left them without looking back, making his way back to his shop. When he crossed between the shadows of the outlying buildings, he stepped out of the line of view, and both his shoulders and antennae sagged. He released a long, shaky breath.

“It was a fine speech,” said a nearby voice.

Sly’s nerves were hardened as pure ore, and so he didn’t jump. But he did turn to the voice’s source perhaps a bit more quickly than the situation warranted. Crouched under an eave was a graybearded old beetle with a permanent sleepy squint. He regarded Sly without judgment.

“Esteemed Nailsmith,” said Sly. “You’re a stealthy one.”

“Force of habit. I would often spend long hours in stillness before my anvil, envisioning my next piece. I confess to having watched you and your apprentices when these old joints of mine protested too loudly in the forge.”

“It’s important that you pace yourself. How goes the work?”

“It goes,” said the Nailsmith. “The product is functional, though further labor is required to make it extraordinary.”

“I hope the measurements I provided were accurate,” Sly said. “It has been a while since I’ve put my eyes to use in such a fashion.”

“The measurements were flawless,” he said bluntly. “But the finishing touches are more art than craft. Sheo has been most useful in that regard. I treasure his counsel.”

“I’m glad to hear it. Where is he now?”

“Resting. He spent too long in the forge with me today. I fear the smoke didn’t agree with him.” He grunted and rose to his feet. “But all shall be well. I had reached the limits of my skill with more traditional work. This proved a fascinating new direction, if nothing else.”

“Someone of your talents could adapt himself to any…” Sly trailed off and cocked his head. “Do you hear that?”

In the direction of the village well, someone was shouting. Sly exchanged a glance with the Nailsmith and bounded off to it, with the older bug hobbling behind. They arrived to see a minor fracas – the Elderbug bent and gasping on the bench, with Cornifer and Iselda attempting to soothe him. Sly thought he glimpsed a dark shadow passing through the doorway into the stag station, but in this dusky twilight it was hard to make out and already gone by the time he blinked. He turned his attention to the other three.

“What happened?” he said. “I heard the commotion.”

“It’s nothing,” the Elderbug wheezed. “Forgive me for troubling you.”

“It was something, all right,” said Iselda. She had one rangy arm around the Elderbug’s shoulders. “Some shadowy stranger came storming out of the graveyard like there were demons at its heels. Gave this poor fellow an awful scare.”

“I think it was a woman,” said Cornifer, his glasses askew. “Though she was rather lacking in social graces. The Elderbug was already aghast by her appearance, and then she all but grabbed him by the lapels and demanded to know where the princess was.”

“The princess? Hornet?” He looked to the Nailsmith, who merely shrugged. “What was this bug? How did we never see her before?”

“I did,” said the Elderbug. “Once. I spied her when trying to visit the cemetery, near the mountain’s base. Thought I’d seen a phantom. For her to come grasping at me like that…again, I apologize. My imagination runs away with me.”

“What did she look like?”

“I barely saw her before she took off,” said Iselda. “Corny, how about you?”

Cornifer hadn’t expected to be put on the spot; he hesitated, cleared his throat. “Well, erm, she was a large one. Almost as tall as Iselda here and far broader. Veiled in shadow, dressed in a faded robe.”

“Her arms,” murmured the Elderbug. “They were so long. There was no end to them.”

“Gods and wyrm,” Sly breathed. “That sounds like the Confessor. She’s been _neighbors_ with me all this time?”

Surprise was not an emotion that often entered Sly’s voice. It was enough to quell the Elderbug’s shaking completely. The Nailsmith had turned to regard the cemetery from which this newcomer had emerged; though his expression was unchanged, there was a hint of awe in his posture.

“Who is the Confessor?” asked Cornifer. “I didn’t come across any mention of them during my survey.”

“Solemn Jiji, speaker to the dark,” said the Nailsmith. “I thought she’d met her end ages ago.”

Sly nodded. “She was a seer, of sorts. Infamous in her time. Rumored to commune with the dead. She was branded as a heretic by polite society, but she held little influence and took no acolytes, so the Pale King left her be. It’s said that she had some relation to the Void-born…”

“Wait, commune with the _dead?”_ Iselda straightened up; unlike Oro and Mato, she was quite comfortable advancing on Sly. “And she wanted to find _Hornet?_ What in the gods’ names has happened to that girl?”

“Calm yourself. If she had perished then Jiji wouldn’t need to look for her. She had…an intuition for that sort of thing.”

“I told her that she’d best try her luck with the stag stations,” said Cornifer. “Heard her ring the bell while Iselda was speaking. Sly, what’s going on down there? I have a bad feeling all of a sudden.”

Iselda fondly laid her hand atop Cornifer’s pate. “And Corny’s own intuition is not to be discounted. It’s guided him through far more hostile lands than these.”

“Perhaps you and your apprentices should investigate,” suggested the Nailsmith.

Sly agreed with Cornifer’s foreboding, because his own senses complemented it. His skills as the Nailsage hadn’t been gained in Hallownest; in times past, he’d pitted himself against wasteland beasts that could crush this hamlet by rolling over in their sleep, and the pounding danger he’d felt then echoed his unease now. What’s more, while he hadn’t known the Confessor very well, she was not the type to go anywhere in a hurry, no matter how dire the circumstances. He had the strong impression that returning underground would like be stumbling blindfolded into a room full of gunpowder and flint.

“Hornet is more capable than many of us,” he said. “We’ll just have to pray for her safe return. Meanwhile – Nailsmith, please make sure your commission is safe and close to hand. Cornifer, the same goes for your maps. Anything you find precious. We’ll keep a vigil tonight, and see what awaits us at daybreak.”

“What do you mean?” the Elderbug asked, clutching the jarred flower beneath his cloak. “What’s going to happen?”

“Hopefully it’s nothing. But luck favors the cautious.”

Oro and Mato still hadn’t shown up, and he didn’t hear the clang of metal in the distance. They’d probably retired to their huts, or, if he was especially fortunate, they were still sitting where he’d left them, exchanging words that weren’t entirely basted in venom for a chance. He went to fetch them, but spared one last glance back to the well and involuntarily shivered. The thought of that hole, full of oily dark, nestled in his mind like a wound.

* * *

Hornet had no choice but to leave Midwife behind. She was far too large to move, and besides, Hornet would have been hard-pressed to find a better resting place than Deepnest’s greatest tomb, besides the body of the queen she’d served for generations. Nevertheless, it took her a long time to convince herself of this – sitting against Herrah’s plinth, watching the patterns of candlelight flicker across the walls. When she finally rose, her legs buckled from stiffness.

She left without looking back. No use in saying anything. The dead couldn’t hear.

Thoughts of revenge flitted through her as she made her way outside, but there was no real passion behind them. While Hornet would probably never know what fit had possessed Rhea to cast that encroaching spell over her mind, the horror in her voice when she’d emerged from her trance had been genuine. Midwife had been killed by sheer happenstance, Rhea had run off, and it could take weeks to find her again, if ever. After all these years, Hornet realized that she lacked the constitution for vengeance. It didn’t exactly fill her with pride.

Right now she just wanted to return to bed and sleep off her failure. Leave this kingdom, with one more ghost trailing in her wake.

She climbed up to the stag station (this form of transport hadn’t been torn down, at least; Deepnest’s natives must not have found it as offensive as the tram-tunnels), rapped the bell, and sat on the bench. Deepnest was remote. It took a few minutes before that increasingly-familiar gallop could be heard. When the stag burst out of the tunnel and skidded to a halt, she rose, prepared to tell him to head for Dirtmouth and shut down any further questions…and then stopped short, because atop his back, someone was already there, peering down at her.

“Told you so!” said the stag triumphantly – it was a moment before Hornet realized he was addressing his passenger. “A sensible young lady like her was sure to avail herself of my services eventually. Better than trawling this entire dusty kingdom, eh?”

The passenger said nothing, just kept watching Hornet. This bug was unfamiliar to her. It was bulbous like a balloon, wore some kind of head covering that reminded her fleetingly of the Snail Shaman (and there was another personage she’d been in no hurry to revisit, he was literally bound to his barrow and it was a creepy old place anyway), and the thin sliver of its face between hat and robe-collar was engulfed in shadow, save for the milky gleam of its eyes. When it abruptly swung off its perch and clambered down the stag, something in Hornet’s stomach twisted. It might have been her imagination, but the way this bug moved suggested its body had far more limbs than its clothing implied.

Yet it approached Hornet timidly, and when it spoke, its voice was female, trilling and not unpleasant.

“As I dreamed,” she said. “Child of Beast and Wyrm?”

She was growing very weary of this topic. “Yes. My name is Hornet.”

“Superb.” Long arms – _very_ long arms, as long as the bug was tall, their many joints moving with an eerie grace – snaked out from her robe, and she clasped her palms together. “It was whispered to me during my prior slumber. Bargained, gendered, truant defender. My name is Jiji, the Confessor. An honor to be in your presence.”

“Charmed, I’m sure. Where do you come from?” She leaned around Jiji, looking at the stag. “Did you seek him out just to find me?”

“Quite so,” said the stag. “She rang for me at Dirtmouth, and I suggested we idle at a cozy spot and wait for when you, yourself, rang the-”

“Hold on. Dirtmouth, you say?”

“I had a little hideaway at the base of Crystal Peak, not far from the village cemetery,” said Jiji. “A refuge. The fever-light beneath had become most disagreeable.”

That graveyard was perhaps ten minutes from Hornet’s front door at a brisk walk. For a minute she was utterly nonplussed.

“Understandable,” she said at last. “What do you want?”

“I am merely a messenger. Roused from sleep by a desperate cry, the voice then falling silent.” Her bubbly tone made this even more unnerving. “It is my gift, you see. I hear the echoes, the regrets. The stains that wayward souls leave in this world, even those departed.” She looked around the empty station, its corners frosted with ancient mold. “Those stains run thick still, but the souls…all has fallen silent.”

“Yes. The light you spoke of was snuffed out.”

“Indeed, I felt it. And then I dozed. For a little while. But that voice had me up like a shot. Pleading for your name, your intervention, and yet I could not dredge its source. Will you visit it?”

“That depends on where I must go,” said Hornet. “I’ve stayed here too long already.”

“Oh, it’s not far.” One spindly arm gestured invitingly to the tunnel. “In the crossroads between village and mountain. A dark stain in an ancestral mound. A place of strange worships.”

The wheels in Hornet’s head turned, then caught. “The shaman’s barrow?”

“If that is what you call it,” she said. “I only see the edges of things, cloaked in shadow. But this place has become positively drenched in it. A smoldering, mournful dark.”

The images arose in quick succession – the approaching mask, its bleeding holes, the bleeding wound in Midwife’s side, that mangled carapace black as a gash carved into the world. But the barrow would have been almost a full day’s trip from here, and that was if the travelers knew every route and didn’t tire on the way. How long had she been out?

“Let’s go,” she said, and strode past Jiji. “Stag. Sorry to keep you waiting.”

“No apology necessary. The Crossroads, then?”

He didn’t seem to bear any resentment toward her for their earlier conversation, when she’d so matter-of-factly conveyed the news of the little ghost’s demise. But before Hornet could answer, he squinted and craned his head toward her, whiskers swaying.

“Miss, did something happen?” he asked. “You look unwell.”

If it was that obvious to a half-blind mount then she really needed to get ahold of herself. “I’m fine. This place brings up troubling memories, that’s all.”

“Hrmm. I know the feeling.” He bent low, allowing access to his saddle. “Off we go, then.”

Jiji took up the vast majority of space on the stag’s back, cheerfully oblivious to how Hornet had to grip its edge to keep him from accidentally bucking her off. Her eyes gleamed in the swampy darkness of the tunnels. While the stag’s galloping was loud, it would have been easy enough for the two of them to converse, but Jiji stayed quiet. Hornet told herself that this was, technically, a survivor of the infection, and she would remiss not to make this futile offer again.

“Confessor?” she asked.

“What is it, princess?”

“Just Hornet,” she said. “You should know that the other residents of Dirtmouth are preparing to leave Hallownest’s confines, alongside myself. I’ve been searching for other survivors. If you’d like to come along…”

“Oh, yes, that would be lovely,” Jiji burbled, and Hornet almost fell out of her seat. “I’ve grown weary of rest, paradoxical as that may sound. A trip into foreign lands would be most stimulating.”

“Well,” said Hornet. “Glad to hear it.”

“I just hope those other bugs are not too unkindly disposed towards me. I was in quite a state when I emerged from my chambers.”

“It’ll be fine,” she said vaguely, and watched the bobbing of the stag’s head as he carried them along. That was her business with Jiji concluded, she thought.

 _But it doesn’t have to be,_ whispered something inside her – long neglected, long buried, but churned up by Rhea’s clawing, grasping spell. _She called herself a speaker to the departed._

Be silent, she told it.

_There is another boon you could ask of her._

“I said be _silent_ ,” she snapped.

“What was that?” Jiji asked.

“Nothing. Forgive me.”

When the stag arrived at the Crossroads station, he considerately slowed his pace in advance, so that his usual skidding halt didn’t fling his passengers into the wall. Hornet made her way down, stepped away, and stopped next to the bell.

“I’ll escort this one to Dirtmouth, shall I?” said the stag. “Though I’ll be around if you need me, miss.”

“I hope to see you again soon,” said Jiji. “Be cautious. The Old Light’s departure has left Hallownest full of mysteries.”

Hornet said, “Wait.”

They blinked at her. She gripped the bell-stand as if bracing herself against a strong wind.

“I should like to discuss another matter with the Confessor,” she said. “Stag, would you give us a moment alone?”

Jiji and the stag glanced at each other, and Jiji made her way down. The stag lowered his head deferentially to Hornet.

“Take all the time you need,” he said, and disappeared into the tunnel. Jiji approached Hornet, her hands – possibly more than one pair of them – nervously kneading together beneath her cloak.

“What's all this about?” she said. “If it’s an escort you need, then I fear I’d be more of a hindrance than anything. My gift is not intended for protection, and I am easily winded…”

“Did you ever meet another bug, before the Radiance perished? Small, silent, white-masked?”

Jiji’s movement halted, and then she nodded eagerly, grateful that Hornet was not about to press-gang her into becoming a meat shield against whatever lay in the shaman’s mound.

“After my previous awakening,” she said. “They were a frequent customer of mine.”

“What was their custom?”

“That bug was a strange one. Terribly accident-prone. Death’s grip found them often but was never able to hold onto them for long. It was as if they were never fully alive or dead to begin with. Their regrets left a palpable shade, a remnant of their essence.”

“A ghost.” Hornet had gone very still.

“In a matter of speaking. I would reunite them with that lost fragment of themselves, so that they would be strengthened once more. Why do you ask? Have they inquired about me, up in that village?”

Hornet still gripped the bell-stand, so tightly now that her chitin threatened to crack. With her other hand, she reached beneath her cloak and produced the little horn. Jiji gazed upon it, and her antennae slowly drooped.

“Oh,” she said.

“I ask this of you,” said Hornet. “If one of those shades yet exists, if there is anything left of them, I would like to know. Just telling me where it’s gone would be enough. Can you do that?”

Hornet’s stare augured through Jiji; she actually flinched away from it, but then rallied. “The atmosphere of this place is hardly ideal, but, well…I’ve developed some familiarity with the color of that little one’s regrets, and a physical focus such as that horn certainly couldn’t hurt…”

“Take it, then. If that’s what you need.”

After a long moment, Jiji nodded, and extended her arm again. She plucked the horn out of Hornet’s hand quickly, as if touching Hornet’s skin would burn her, and stepped away, her heels at the platform’s edge. She studied the horn. She turned it over in her fingers, almost caressed it. Before long she had closed her eyes and begun to hum, a single dolorous note that went on without cessation or interruption, its harmonics quavering beneath Hornet’s shell. She imagined that sound spreading throughout Hallownest in tendrils like tree roots, into its darkest places, until a resonance with that pale sliver in Jiji’s hands could be found. Whether it lay back in Deepnest, or the Crystal Peak, or wherever the Pale King’s castle had vanished to, or even in the bubbling depths of the Abyssal Sea, she would know. And she would go there.

Jiji’s eyes opened. She raised her head to Hornet.

She said, “I’m sorry.”

Water dripped somewhere unseen. Hornet didn’t speak.

“There is a stain upon this, to be certain,” Jiji said. “But not theirs. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” said Hornet. “I understand.”

“I hope you find some peace, after this latest trouble is behind us. Regret, grief, guilt, all of these are inescapable, but if left untended for too long, they become corrosive to the soul.” Jiji held out the horn. “This belongs to you.”

She took it, bowed, turned, left. The bell sounded in her wake, and when the stag had re-emerged onto the platform, she was already gone, past the walls slick with vitriolic light and marred by bleeding shadow. The horn was still in her hand. She briefly contemplated throwing it off the walkway’s edge, where it would come to rest somewhere on the cave floor. Just one more piece of unnoticeable refuse, to be crusted with lime and silica over the years until it was indistinguishable from the ground on which it lay, digested by the kingdom.

She tucked it beneath her cloak, lashed it to her belt, and continued on.

 _Not you, too._ That was what she’d said to Midwife as she lay dying, the words scuttling out of her like vermin from disturbed earth. In the time she’d spent there afterward, sitting beneath her mother’s corpse as the undying candle-flames wavered and bent, she had tried to convince herself that it was Herrah she’d spoken of – one more guardian, taken from her too soon. But she had just stood over her mother’s body and felt only finality, the conclusion of a mourning already undertaken. No, that was not what she’d meant at all. That was not it, at all.

* * *

It was clear that something had gone wrong with the barrow long before coming to its entrance. The tunnels that led to the Shaman’s home were studded with torches, perpetually burning like the candles around Herrah’s plinth, but these were no mere memorials – those greasy flames had been infused with protective wards of fearsome potency. On her rare trips past this area, she had never seen a single one of the Radiance’s thralls wander by, and in the infection’s final days, the tunnels and barrow were likewise clear of the infected air and pustulent growths that had invaded the rest of the Crossroads. But now all those flames had been doused. She walked through darkness, and emerged into a deeper darkness still.

The barrow’s entrance and all the surrounding stones were clotted with great lashings of claggy dark – here soft as mud, here with a crystalline shine, here dripping down in clumps but making no sound as it stuck and pooled in the ground beneath. It called to mind the first thing she’d seen upon awakening in the Temple of the Black Egg, the sconces dripping with freshly hemorrhaged Void, but that dark had evaporated like morning dew before her eyes. This was more permanent, and menacing. She did not want to touch it. And worse, the entire cave had been _warped_ , the mound and ceiling wrenched out of shape as if the whole structure had gone soft as clay, producing fresh eaves and recesses for this darkness to accumulate. Hornet gripped her needle and thought with a dread certainty that this had indeed been Rhea’s doing, and that it had not been a protracted assault but one single attack, a thunderclap of wrath that had distorted and stained the very fabric of the world. She’d faced no end of monsters in her time as Hallownest’s protector, but what could be done against a foe so outwardly pathetic, so scraping and deferential, and yet filled with such uncanny power as to wreak this sort of damage? What had compelled Rhea to act this time? And what would she do next?

She wouldn’t find answers out here, at any rate. She steeled herself and stepped inside.

The barrow’s foyer, where the Shaman meditated, looked to be ground zero for this disaster; liquefied dark squelched underfoot and even the air had become hard to breathe, gummy and sticky in her throat. Its dimensions were hard to discern, the chamber now bulging outward in queasy, swooping angles filled with yet more crawling shadow. She wished for a lantern, and then decided that it wouldn’t have done her any good – no mundane light would have pierced all of this.

“Shaman? Is anyone there?” she called. Her voice didn’t echo back, drunk up by the void. No answer, either. She picked her way to the meditation chamber (cracked like an egg, leaning perilously, the bones which had made it up now plated with darkness), and her probing needle struck something. She knelt, peered down, and then stepped back quickly and turned away, hand over her eyes.

The Shaman was there, yes. But he was not _all_ there.

Could this have been averted if she’d come earlier, on her first delve into the Crossroads? Hornet doubted it. The Snail Tribe was adept in the mystic arts, but it came at a price – past a certain age, they confined themselves to their barrows, drawing strength from the totems entombed there, and if they left, by choice or otherwise, all their spellcasting talent would vanish. The Shaman had more to lose from leaving Hallownest than most. But staying looked to have cost him far more.

One more survivor, lost. One more corpse at that interloper’s feet. Hornet’s grip tightened on her needle. Duty might have been a weak thread, but she felt its tug nonetheless.

_“Oho, you actually came! Excellent!”_

She screamed, a little. She would not deny it if pressed. But when she wheeled around and pointed her weapon at the voice, her terror was swallowed by bewilderment – because there was the Shaman, except transparent and floating some distance off the ground, limned with drifting points of light like stray sparks.

 _“As you can see, I got into a bit of trouble. Entirely self-inflicted, if I’m to be honest, and I overestimated my talents.”_ The Shaman’s voice was clear but tinny, like he was speaking from the bottom of a hole. _“With my last bit of consciousness, I petitioned Hallownest’s defender-princess to come to my aid, and here you are! Did you hear my thoughts? My talents astound even myself!”_

Hornet swallowed hard. “Shaman. Please try not to be alarmed by this, but you appear to be dead.”

 _“Do I?”_ He finally noticed the sad, broken thing underneath his feet. _“Well, that’s annoying. Irrelevant to our present business, however.”_

“Was it Rhea? Did she do this?”

_“So you know her! Did you encounter her in Deepnest, perchance?”_

“Yes.” She touched her mask; her head still throbbed. “It didn’t go well.”

_“Then you have some experience with her skills. Good, good. That saves us time. Come closer, would you? Can’t seem to move in this state.”_

She approached him, cautiously. His diaphanous form become even less substantial when viewed from up close; her eyes wouldn’t focus on him, kept trying to dismiss him as a trick of the light. It reminded her of that child hunched beside the Grimm Troupe’s flame. So much down here did not want to be seen.

 _“Listen,”_ he said. _“I must ask a weighty favor. I’ve been aware of this bug’s presence since the Old Light was snuffed out. She’s been leaving her marks all throughout the kingdom, most likely for untold years. I had her take audience with me. In a rather compulsory fashion, I must say. Hoho.”_

Her marks. Those unsettling glyphs. “What did you learn? Who is she?”

 _“She is ancient,”_ said the Shaman. _“A survivor from the histories forgotten by the histories our histories forgot. The Abyss held its own nation, did you know? Before the Radiance burnt it out. From thence she fled, and then returned, to begin her work. A work that_ must not _be completed.”_

“And that’s what you died trying to stop.” She regarded the mangled mound. “Someone else I knew also spoke of her. A labor completed. And she mentioned Dreamer knowledge…but how is that so dire? No evidence of the ritual is left. Even my mother and the other Dreamers weren’t told of how it was conducted. The only one who knows it in full would have been the King himself.”

The Shaman stared. Realization dawned, in a great, pale light. Hornet felt her blood rime with ice.

“That’s not possible,” she whispered.

 _“It is what she told me. He will be called forth.”_ All the jollity had left the Shaman’s voice. _“However she plans it, she has turned this entire kingdom into a focus for this rite. It would seem the question of possibility does not concern her.”_

“But that’s…it can’t…” The room pitched and yawed around her; she ran a hand up her mask and gripped a horn as though it would keep her moored. “He concerns me not. None of this does. Why did you die for this? Did you hate him that deeply?”

 _“Of course not,”_ the Shaman said. _“He was beloved. And once upon a time, I’m sure that the Radiance was, too.”_

To that, she had no answer. All she could think of were the long days in the City of Tears’ upper reaches, watching the slow orbit of lights below. The people consumed by the Old Light’s cheated rage. The Shaman nodded, like that image had been broadcasted to his own mind.

_“This land has already suffered under the depredations of a god revived. No matter how slim the chances, that calamity must not be repeated. Call it an old snail’s dying wish. Seek Rhea. Stop the ritual. Let the pale monarch lie still.”_

“I wouldn’t even know where to…” she began, but then stopped. Rhea had babbled something else during their encounter. Gentle Bardoon, friend of many years…

“I’ll try,” she said. “There may be one in Kingdom’s Edge who can advise me further.”

 _“Excellent. Our visits were brief, princess, and frankly I found you somewhat unpleasant. But I thank you for honoring my request. Although,”_ he added as she turned to leave, _“I must trouble you with another. Oh, don’t look at me like that. This will be an education! Hoho.”_

Unpleasant, he said. The feeling was mutual; ghosts shouldn’t be this smug. “What is it?”

_“It’s quite remarkable that you’re able to see me at all. Ghosts drift all throughout this world, souls trapped between the realms of dream and waking, but it is not easy to attune oneself to their presence. My great-grandfather learned that this can only be done through years of painful study…or by possession of a certain artifact. Are you carrying a nail-hilt, by any chance?”_

Yes, she was. Not for long, but long enough so that she’d almost forgotten that she’d had it at all. These relics beneath her cloak already felt like part of her. Her fingers touched the pure-forged nail sheathed to her back, and then quested downward, to the wrought and ornate hilt she’d tied to it. When she produced it, the Shaman clapped his spectral hands in delight.

_“Oh! Ohoho! A genuine Dream Nail, as I live and breathe…er, well, you know what I mean. One who wields that may see into the ethereal, and gain other talents besides.”_

“I have seen it in use. On the Dreamers, on the-”

_-threadbound, mask cracked by needle-pierce, arc of pale mask so familiar, the nova of golden light and the gold light boiling from unshut eyes and these sentiments transmitted not her own-_

She squeezed her eyes shut, then opened them again.

“I have seen it,” she said tightly. “It slays without leaving a mark. Does it attack the soul?”

 _“No, no. According to my family’s studies, if you cut one living with that nail, it would allow you to glimpse into their mind. Disorienting, I’m sure, but hardly lethal. But if used on a spirit such as myself, it dismisses us from this world.”_ He spread his arms wide. _“Would you do me the favor?”_

Hornet waited for a punchline. But none came.

“What will happen to you?” she asked.

 _“I’ll be obliterated,”_ he said matter-of-factly. _“But that’s all right. My knowledge will hardly be of any good in this state. And the fact that I yet persist here, even after realizing the truth of my death, unsettles me. Perhaps my barrow’s spell binds me to it even now. I do not relish the thought of being tethered to this place for all eternity.”_

Everything he said was eminently reasonable. But her arms had become leaden, this hilt suddenly as heavy as the first time she’d hoisted her needle. The voices remaining in Hallownest were already so few. To silence yet another was a responsibility beyond the ones to which she’d become accustomed.

“I don’t know how,” she said weakly.

 _“It’s quite simple.”_ Now the Shaman’s voice was gentle; perhaps he’d noticed her distress. _“One such as you must have some understanding of how to manipulate Soul. Merely focus yours through that hilt, and the blade will manifest. Think of it as spinning a thread.”_

So she did. She held the Dream Nail before her and envisioned her Soul-silk running from her hands, coiling through its spirographic interior in shining patterns. And there was a crackle and a flash, and the blade leapt up like a stoked flame, that fierce blue-white glow making even the void-thickened shadows recoil.

 _“A Dream Nail unleashed,”_ said the Shaman, awestruck. _“From this little mound I have witnessed the fall of a kingdom. The revival of a god and the death of two. The coming and passing of a virulent curse, the arrival of a Void-born, the unleashing of its forgotten arts in all their terrible glory. And now this. Such a life it’s been.”_ He tilted his head back and closed his eyes. _“Filled with such wonders.”_

Hornet cried out and swung the nail, and the instant that phantasmal blade made contact with the Shaman’s shade he burst into a flurry of shining motes. Then the blade disappeared, and all she could see were those sparks, drifting in playful spirals, before they too faded and only darkness remained.


	5. Chapter 5

The Blue Lake’s sapphiric gleam breathed itself into the surrounding air, filled it with a swarm of glittering motes like sparks ejected from some colossal slagpit, and the lake’s surface too was filled with relentless motion, the droplets and rivulets of water from the stones above and beneath causing it to lap and ripple. The overall effect was hypnotic. A visitor could spend hours here at the lakeshore, the opposite end barely visible through all the blue, watching this tarantellasmic sway. Hornet didn’t know how long she’d stood there, heels digging into the sand, but she jerked to awareness as if from a long dream and felt stiffness in her joints.

The fastest way from the Shaman’s barrow to Bardoon was across this lake, into the vast catacombs where the central monument to the Dreamers lay, and then down the abandoned lift into Kingdom’s Edge. She’d crossed over to here in all haste (passing by Salubra’s shop, where the sound of her laughter still drifted), but once she’d reached these shores, she had taken a moment to rest and then just drifted off. She groaned and rubbed her mask between her eyes. Her mind was still shaking off the effects of Rhea’s spell. Everything a distraction, a clamor. The past pulled at her like quickmud.

At the very least, crossing the lake would allow her to stretch. She readied her needle and the air around her flashed pale, her Soul-thread snapping in place.

Hornet’s acrobatics had been impressive even before the infection had overtaken the kingdom, and her skill had only grown with time; at this point, there was likely no obstacle in Hallownest that she and her threads could not effortlessly traverse. Her needle buried itself into an outcropping of rock high above and then off she went, cloak rustling as she swung and scurried and even seemed to dash across the surface of the Blue Lake itself, skeins of invisible-thin silk laid long across the water so that it would bear her weight. On the lake bobbed the corpses of tiktiks and vengeflies that hadn’t been able to regain their senses before they’d fallen in and drowned, and in time they would sink to join all the others – a substrata of corpses unseen, bugs who’d weighted themselves and marched down to where, even if the Festerglow found them, their bodies could only feebly paw at the silt beneath and then lie still. Hornet’s reflection passed over them all, a faded red heart against the mourning blue.

She reached the opposite shore without even getting winded, then shouldered her needle, prepared to walk off. But something else caught her eye. A glint in the sand, a shape indistinct from here but clear enough for her to know that it was unfamiliar. Time was of the essence. But she found herself approaching it anyway.

A nail had been planted in the sand. At first glance it appeared rather plain, but while she was no aficionado for weapons, she recognized the mottling of its surface. To confirm, she drew the smaller nail she carried and compared the two, and sure enough, the similarity in the blades was striking – the filigree of pale ore, imbued only in weapons of surpassing make. And when the light struck this other nail in a certain way, she could make out further patterns along its edge, characters in a code at once known and undecipherable. She’d crossed this space often enough for its addition to be recent and she knew of no bugs who wielded a nail this fine. Why abandon it in this dripping corner of a kingdom gone silent? What eyes could witness it? What hand could grasp it?

She felt cool chitin under her palm and looked at the hand that had disappeared beneath her cloak as if it had become foreign to her, a parasite slithering into the socket. It had clutched the thicker of the two horns on her belt, quite independent of the rest of her.

She shook it off, straightened up and sheathed her own blade, and looked out to the lake, whose waters lay so opaque and deep. If the nail’s wielder had left it as some kind of memorial, then they must have hoped it would go untouched – become part of the landscape, immovable as the stones themselves. So it went for all of Hallownest. Its nature had reflected that of its architect, stasis born from a wish. Hornet wondered what that architect might think if he saw the state the kingdom was in now.

She hurried on. The nail stayed where it was, catching the Blue Lake’s shine, as the water continued its circulation into the city below.

* * *

Hornet tried to maintain her purpose. But before long, she was ensnared by a light of a different kind.

She had dashed through the catacombs without a second glance at the landscape – the Dreamers’ memorials weren’t even in her path, and she had no interest whatsoever in yet another assemblage of burial mounds – and effortlessly swung down the empty shaft whose elevator had once joined this place to the City of Tears. From there, the upmost corridor would lead her most quickly to Bardoon, her one potential lead for Rhea’s whereabouts.

The tunnel here had grown quiet as countless others, though the ground was cratered and scorched in places where stunned belflies had tumbled from their perches and detonated on impact. They’d always been one of the more obnoxious threats in Hallownest, but their volatile nature had left them particularly vulnerable to the addled state brought on by the infection’s banishment, and Hornet hadn’t seen a single one since she’d first descended into Dirtmouth’s well. These corridors felt lonelier without those soft chirrups.

She reached the point where the tunnel became a sheer slope down into the lower reaches of Kingdom’s Edge, that vast pit choked with flurries of god-molt. She prepared to descend, but something stopped her. A glimpsed spark. Too distant to be seen and yet burrowing into her mind like a scorch-hole in canvas.

Far down the tunnel was the Colosseum of Fools, and somewhere in its depths, a fire had been lit. She could envision its waver beckoning her, hear the invitation in its crackle.

By the time she regained some semblance of her senses she had already crossed the Colosseum’s threshold, where the Little Fool’s corpse swung black-eyed from their chains like some macabre pendulum. The firepit in the arena’s center was plain to see, and behind her was once again that curtain of impenetrable black.

This time, when she approached the Troupe, she had her needle at the ready.

There was the wagon, of course, its impossible presence spreading the dream-haze like pollen. In the stands were Divine and Brumm, the former’s mask now covering all but a single eye still wrinkled in hungering mirth, the latter’s instrument silent in his hands. The steeds both knelt before the throne, which was now bereft of the Fool corpse that had overseen these bloody games. The arena itself should have been crammed with corpses, fighters and spectators alike, but there were no bodies here at all. The shadows did not settle properly upon these strangers. The firelight passed through them, snaked around them, lashed against the arena’s high walls in fanged and mystic patterns.

“Princess,” said Grimm. “We must speak.”

He stood behind the fire in the same graceful pose as before, but this time there was no bow or flourish, and that papyrus rasp of a voice now wavered like the flame itself. The child was there, too, sitting crosslegged at the flame, soundless and still. Hornet held her weapon close.

“So you know who I am,” she said. “You always knew, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” said Grimm. “A feigned ignorance, a tasteless joke. Forgive me. I was late in understanding the significance of our return to this land. How long has it been since we last talked?”

“I’m not sure. A day, perhaps.”

Grimm stared, then angled his head skyward. Hornet followed his gaze and saw only dark – except, for a moment, there was a movement in that darkness, a mammoth pulsation that made her bones tremble.

“Of course,” said Grimm. “Of course.”

Brumm played a single long note, like a distant funereal wail.

“Time escapes you on the road,” said Grimm. “And we have traveled much in search of understanding. You pursue a black mourner, do you not?”

“I do. And I haven’t the time to waste on your Troupe.”

“There is no time. Not for the moment, anyway.” His cloak rustled, and he gestured to the fire. “Sit and warm yourself. You’ll not find a better opportunity for rest.”

The firelight’s ring had further constricted the world; the Colosseum’s exit now led nowhere. She approached the flame and found it smokeless and bereft of fuel and smelling like dry and mummified meat, like the lichen-spice that had saturated the rotting remains of her home, but it was warm. The child gave her no notice as she planted her needle in the sand. She prepared to sit down, pulling up her cloak.

The child looked at her.

Their head snapped round with a wet _crack_ like a breaking limb and with that sound came a burst of light and heat as the fire flared up, vomiting sparks, the mad kaleidoscope of its shadows ensnaring them all. Hornet froze, pinned in place by the child’s eyes – wide and unblinking and red beyond red, heartblood splashed across ivory. She looked to Grimm and saw him staring now with the same expression, and Brumm, and even Divine, her visible eye wide and scandalized; the steeds had turned their heads so that their snouts joined and a single eye apiece was visible like something malformed and conjoined in the murky darkness of the stands.

Grabbing her weapon was unthinkable. Fear had turned her limbs to stone. The very air felt full of blades and something primordial inside her gibbered that if this child was not entreated, if she made the least error, then she would be flensed apart. But she didn’t know what they wanted, until she looked back to the flame, still sputtering wild. Its tongues had taken on a familiar shape – a stubbed, notched arc.

Slowly, her hand crept to the little horn on her belt. The threads keeping it there unwound, and she held it out to the child. They reached out, their own limbs shaking with the effort as if afflicted by palsy, and took it. They looked to the horn, then to her, and back to the horn, and then hunched low and clutched it to their chest.

When she looked up, Grimm and the others had resumed their old poses, all paying her little interest. She collapsed to the blood-soaked sand, trying to slow her gasping breath.

“Your quarry is slippery indeed,” said Grimm. “Our scarlet eyes did not notice her, at first. But now we know of her aims. As do you.”

What had just transpired would not be acknowledged. She had no choice but to play along.

“Is it possible?” she asked. “What she’s doing?”

Grimm took a minute to answer. He stood there like a stake pounded into the earth.

“No,” he said. “Not as she intends it. Not to my experience.”

Somehow this didn’t bring her any relief. “Why not?” 

“Even in these haunted lands, a life is not so easily recovered,” he said. “It may linger, yes, it may be prolonged, certainly, but all who cross that threshold are indelibly marked. If the ritual succeeds, then the Pale King that returns may be quite different from how he used to be.”

Brumm played a note, and it was like the wind blowing across the eyeholes of the long-dead.

“I have heard it said that a god’s only crime is to die,” said Grimm. “Do you give that any credence, Princess?”

“What gods do is not my concern. But the Pale King already perished once.”

“Yes. In transformation. And then he fled his domain and summoned all his divine might to commit the unthinkable, and die again. To resurrect him now would be sacrilege thrice-fold. Could this land bear such an offense, I wonder?”

“Your cryptic mutterings are also not my concern,” she said, though without as much bravado as she’d have liked. “Why are you here, Troupe-master? Do you have anything of substance to offer me besides this feeble flame?”

Divine laughed then, a jagged witchlike cackle that trailed off into a sob, even as her visible expression was unchanged. The child’s fingers clittered and scraped across the horn. Grimm looked at Hornet through the flame, and spoke his next words like an intonation.

“Through dream I travel, at lantern’s call, to absorb the flames of a kingdom’s fall,” he said, and the child shivered. “But all has been extinguished now – the dream, the lanterns, and Hallownest’s flame. I begin to suspect that we were not summoned here, but _sent_. And it is not the fall of a mere kingdom that we have come to witness.”

Brumm played a note, and it was the sound of Midwife’s final breath.

“I must go,” said Hornet.

“Yes. You must.” Grimm smirked, his fang-tips bloody in the firelight. “We bear witness only. We are compelled. But you, wandering scrap of god, have our undivided attention. I wish you luck in your endeavor.”

The child ran its fingertips over the horn as if feeling out some hidden message carved into its surface, like the typography inscribed on that mysterious nail. They pressed it to their face like they meant to kiss it. They appeared more attached to that sliver of chitin than she ever had. Trying to take it back from them would be hopeless.

She gave it one final lingering look, committing its shape to memory. She sighed and stood, gripping her needle for balance, and then she turned to leave and the child was there.

Hornet leapt back with her scream half-strangled in her throat and very nearly made the fatal error of raising her weapon. The child stood before her and whole of the arena seemed to warp around them, distending around their mute and furtive presence. Now she understood that they were the nexus of these unnatural shadows; the light struck them and was fractured into tentacular writhe.

They proffered the horn to her in their outstretched hands.

Hornet looked to the ivory curving across those skeletal palms, and then up to the child’s expectant stare. Her own hand trembled as she took the horn and returned it to its place beneath her cloak. The child’s arms lowered, they regarded her for a second longer, and then they dropped their gaze and shuffled past and sat down again, watching the fire.

* * *

The City of Tears might have been the Pale King’s opus, his monument to stasis, but it still didn’t compare to the resting-place of his former shell. The molt-fall, these drifting flakes of diaphanous skin, crumbled to ashy dust that coated every inch of the rock and rendered them immune to erosion by wind and water alike. The ash also swallowed up the multitudinous bodies that draped across the jutting rocks and curled beneath the aqueduct’s pipes – those who had fallen from the Colosseum and, more recently, the piles of deceased wildlife – so that they would crumble and become one with the dunes. It was as if the divine corpse had imbued its grave with its reincarnation’s yearning for the eternal. By its death, the land would be forever preserved.

The footing here was treacherous, and Hornet was still so shaken that she had to pick her way carefully across the Edge’s twin pits – to fall, then rise again, where Bardoon slept. Her previous meetings with the caterpillar had been even fewer than those with the White Lady, and before today, the two of them had had little to offer each other. He wasn’t of any divine breed, but sheer age and size had nevertheless conferred upon him some uncanny knowledge of Hallownest’s origins and her own parentage, and he’d regarded her with gentle disinterest. To him, she must have appeared as fleeting and insignificant as one of the molt-flakes. She hoped that he would understand the urgency of this matter.

She made the final ascent to his dwelling and for one horrible moment envisioned finding nothing there but an empty black pit, Bardoon having left of his own volition and taking any hope of finding Rhea with him. But it wasn’t long before a particular sound assuaged her, even though it rattled her fangs in their sockets. Bardoon’s snoring was more felt than heard.

Hornet pulled herself up to one final platform and approached him, a massive heap of striated gray that heaved and lolled in the depths of sleep. When she stood before it, that movement ceased, and his mask – so comically small compared to the rest of him, its mouth etched in a neutral line – emerged from the folds of his meat, and looked down at her.

“Venerable Bardoon,” she said. “It is I, Hornet. Do you remember me?”

His mask disappeared, then emerged again, like a slow blink. He sighed deep enough to make Hornet’s cloak flutter.

“Your presence here can only mean that she has crossed your path,” he rumbled. “Rhea of the Black Seventeen.”

Her triumph was tinged with dread. She already believed that Rhea would be a fearsome foe, and that impression was only strengthened by hearing her name spoken with such import, in Bardoon’s quaking and dolorous voice.

“She has,” said Hornet. “This is a dire matter. I have to find where she’s gone. Can you help?”

“Tell me all. Leave nothing unsaid.”

So she did, starting with the Radiance’s death, brushing past her uneventful time in Dirtmouth and quest to find the other survivors, and then to the encounter in Deepnest, where Rhea’s many probing fingers had sunk into her past. She didn’t tell him about the Troupe, despite her best efforts – any attempt to describe either of her meetings with them broke into useless stammering, like the words were being forced back down her throat – but when she spoke of the Shaman and how she’d learned of Rhea’s goal, Bardoon’s stubby limbs scraped the ground, in a manner reminiscent of clenching fists.

“She called you a friend,” Hornet finished. “I didn’t know who else to turn to.”

“Many years ago did we first meet. I had just fled the clamoring mindlessness of the light-addled ones beneath, and soon found my rest disturbed by her arrival. She spoke of many things. That her words were oft met with silence did not discourage further visits.”

“To hear Rhea tell it, your parting wasn’t on the best of terms.”

“Mrmm. I was most dismissive towards her. Most unkind.” Another blink, his face retreating into the depths of himself. “It is regrettable. Rhea did nothing to me that warranted such scorn. But I could not help myself. Within her coils, I beheld the shape of my death.”

Hornet shuddered. Portents were gathering around this woman thick as acid fumes.

“What does she want, Bardoon?” she asked. “What good could the Vessel’s ritual do for her? Is she trying to harness all the shells that were left in the Abyss?”

“The King’s castoff spawn interest her not. It is the Dreamers she seeks. What she desires to become.”

Hornet stared dumbly. She remembered Rhea descending upon her mother with a predatory love, speaking of the curse that the King had laid on her in ecstatic tones. The misery that had spread through Deepnest when that slumbering body had first been carried into their village. A lonely, misbegotten immortality. She couldn’t reckon with the insanity of striving for it.

“She has slithered through the cadavers of ages,” said Bardoon. “Ever fleeing time’s grasp. Hallownest’s stasis granted her a momentary reprieve from the rituals she undertook to preserve herself, but there is no spell more potent for resisting death than that used for the Vessel’s seal. She would sleep, and forever mourn all that she has lost.”

“And for that alone, she would resurrect the Wyrm?” Hornet said, through clenched teeth. “For something so utterly _puerile?_ Hard to believe that a mind so limited could manage such a feat.”

“Rhea holds knowledge of arts that were long forgotten even before my birth, and her madness has served only to enhance her talents. I believe there is nothing that she could not do, if given sufficient cause. You may doubt the wisdom of her task, Princess, but not its realization.”

She tugged her needle’s strap. “I will slay her if I must.”

“To what end? Prevention of the Wyrm’s revival?”

“The Shaman was right. We’ve already seen what sort of havoc can be wrought by a resurrected god. Everything the Pale King built already lies in ruin. There is nothing to be gained from his return now, least of all to satisfy some insane hag’s craving for immortality. You may take offense, but-”

“My idleness is not borne from sympathy for her plight,” he said. “I have sensed the markings she has left throughout Hallownest, and while I cannot glean their full purpose, they call to mind an eye unopened. An unsettling image, hrmm. Yet throughout her unwelcome visits, I did not dissuade her through word or deed, in feeble hope that her designs would come to naught. But I now see the shape they have taken. Her coils encompass all.” Bardoon paused. “I am afraid, Princess.”

Hornet had nothing to say to that. It would be like trying to comfort a mountain.

“I have always been afraid,” he continued. “Perhaps that is why I never pupated. Transformation is its own kind of death. I resisted both, always.” His mask rose to stare over the precipice of his dwelling. “Is that why she felt such kinship with me, no matter how coldly I behaved? Oh, Rhea.”

She imagined his mask’s blank gaze trained on some point in the distant past. Meetings that could have been prolonged, words that should have never been left unsaid. But before she could say anything – offer some commiseration, no matter how inadequate – he settled and faced her again.

“She makes her dwelling not far from the Wyrm’s old shell,” he told her. “She worships it, I think. It is hidden behind her arts, but for you, I believe the path shall be open wide. Now that she is aware of your existence, your heritage, she will hope for your pursuit. For you to share her joy at your sire’s return.”

“Those hopes are about to be dashed.” Hornet bowed. “You have my thanks, Bardoon. I suggest you flee this kingdom, just in case your premonitions are true.”

“No,” he said, and she looked up in puzzlement. “Further retreat would benefit me not. In this newly godless land, I shall remain, and await whatever comes. Goodbye, little protector.”

Further argument would be like trying to whittle down a boulder with her needlepoint. She stood there a moment longer and then left him, diving back into the pit. The path forked further down; in one direction lay the divine corpse and the way to Rhea. But she went in the opposite direction, back the way she came. If Bardoon had been right, and Rhea really was delaying the ritual in until Hornet could be there to see it, then she still had time. There was one more task left undone.

* * *

The pipes and aqueducts that jutted out from the City of Tears’ lower reaches filled Kingdom’s Edge with a precipitation as relentless as the molt-fall; from here, the city’s befouled water spilled, pooled, and sank through the crevices far below, down to parts unknown. Maybe it went all the way to the Abyssal Sea, disappearing completely into that negating dark. Hornet didn’t like traveling through these pipes, cramped and smelly as they were, but this one offered the quickest route back to the King’s Station, and that’s where she needed to go.

The belflies here had also died, and in places, water leaked through the holes they’d blasted into the aqueduct’s sides. It made for a quick trip. She emerged into the terminal (corpse-strewn like everywhere else, their plump bodies lying upon the opulent pillows scattered about like they’d just curled up to sleep) and went up a level, past the sign bearing its marking of a stag’s head.

The stag station here was a wrought-iron awning lined with glass and open at the front, so that the rain’s patter was nearly too loud to hear oneself think; where it opened, the wicked spikes decorating the rooftop could be seen, and the black-eyed gargoyle with water pouring out its slime-slicked mouth. For what was supposed to be the finest stop in the entire stagway, Hornet found it incredibly morbid. She turned to the bell, rapped it hard, and then watched the designs on the glass, the raindrops eating each other as they fattened and ran.

Water splashed around the stag’s pounding feet as he came out of the tunnel. He snorted, shook rain off his whiskers.

“Young miss,” he said. “How did your errand go?”

“It’s done. But there is another to follow.” She went to the platform’s edge. “I hope Confessor Jiji’s return to Dirtmouth was uneventful.”

“Iselda told me everything. There was a bit of a commotion, but whatever misunderstanding she caused up there earlier was quickly forgiven.” His nostrils flared. “Though you may want to know that Iselda was also very concerned for your own welfare. She seemed ready to jump on my back and whip me all across the kingdom, but her husband and the Nailsage talked her out of it.”

“I’m glad they did,” said Hornet. “You’ve put yourself through a lot of trouble for my sake. But I have another favor to ask of you.”

“Ask away. These old bones have some life in them yet!”

“Return to Dirtmouth,” she said. “Find some way of getting their attention. Tell them I am well, for the moment, but I no longer know when I’ll be able to return. They must leave Hallownest immediately. Take whatever they can carry and go.”

The rainfall filled the silence between them.

“This sounds serious,” said the stag. “Even for you.”

“Yes. It would take too long to explain. But this must be done, and done alone. Their lives would be forfeit if they tried to accompany me, and if I should fail, I don’t know what will happen to this land. Better for them to flee now, in case the worst comes to pass.”

“If it’s really so dangerous, then I imagine you’ll be needing a hasty escort to the surface yourself. The way up from here is long and perilous, even with the infection gone. And so.” He stomped the tracks. “I will stay here, and await your return.”

“Don’t be asinine,” she snapped. “I asked you to deliver a message. If you don’t go-”

“All of us are well-aware that something foul is transpiring in this kingdom. It’s why the Nailsage insisted that none of Dirtmouth’s residents come down here after you. But do not mistake their caution for coldness. I could lash every blasted one of those bugs to myself and try to drag them past the Howling Cliffs, and they’d fight me kicking and screaming every step of the way. Will I deliver a redundant and unwanted message, while a passenger may be in need of transportation further below? Unthinkable.” He reared up, legs kicking, and came down hard enough to wet Hornet’s ankles with the impact. “In my heart of hearts, I believe that there are yet more stags in this world, but I am the only one remaining in Hallownest. I shall see my duty through to the end. The same as you.”

Hornet stood with arms dangling limp; the stag gave a firm nod and then looked away, apparently considering the matter closed. But then she jumped off the platform and onto the tracks, though the puddles here came past her ankles, and stepped up to the stag’s face. He pawed the ground uneasily, head swinging about.

“What’s this, now? There are regulations against standing on the…well, in any case, you’re liable to catch a chill.” He craned his neck, trying to shelter her against the rain.

“I’m sorry,” Hornet said.

His head retracted. “Beg pardon?”

“I’ve been wandering the kingdom’s depths since the infection took hold.” Her voice was so low that the raindrops’ sound threatened to swallow it entirely. “I passed by these stations more time than I could count, but I left them untouched. I didn’t want to restore life to an inch of this hateful place. And so you were forced to languish in the dark. Until they came along.” She looked up at him, water dewing in the eyeholes of her mask. “I’m certain that you were invaluable to that bug’s quest. They would have been grateful.”

The stag’s voice also became quieter, like the stained gargoyle overhead might hear. “Miss, if you don’t mind my asking, who were they to you?”

“I don’t know.” Her eyes dropped, her fists clenched. “I never had the chance to learn. Or maybe I did, and just never took it. There was so much to do, and only after it was all over did I finally…” And now they began to shake. “I couldn’t understand how to…”

Something brushed against her side and she almost tumbled over from shock before realizing that it was the stag, nuzzling her with his hoary cheek. His whiskers absorbed moisture like a sponge and the gesture just soaked her further, but she kept still until he was finished, her hands loosening at her sides.

“I didn’t know them too well myself,” he said, “but it’s obvious that you two cared for each other. They wouldn’t want to see you in pain. Please look after yourself, miss. Now and after this danger has passed.”

She laid her palm against the side of the stag’s mask. “I’ll try. But promise me – the moment you sense anything awry, the least tremor or chill, run back to the surface as fast as your legs will carry you. It isn’t safe down here.”

“Hearing that from you, I don’t think it’s ever been truer,” he said gravely. “You have my word.”

“Thank you, stag. Not just for today. For all your years of faithful service.”

“Oh, that’s quite enough. Away with you.” He nodded to the exit. “Before you see me blush.”

She hoisted herself back up to the platform and left, battening rain off her cloak as she went. The stag watched her go, and then turned and regarded the city beyond the window-glass – those drenched and colorless spires, reduced to pillars of featureless fuzz by his diminished vision – and then up, to the cavern’s unseen ceiling. Hornet had asked before if he’d wanted to see the sky, and he’d declined politely, but his feelings on the matter were stronger than he let on. Even this vast space made him feel crushingly insignificant. But Hornet’s words, praise from the last scion of Hallownest, swelled in him, and for this moment he felt larger than the entire city. For that, he would wait as long as it took. He carefully folded his legs underneath him and settled in, his rain-slicked horn sheening white in the station’s faded glow.

* * *

Ash had already covered up the marks where she and the little ghost had last fought – the slashes and punctures left by needle and nail, the oily patches where the ghost’s Void arts had deformed the land. She scooped up a handful of the crumbling molt, let it trickle through her fingers.

“I’d be more confident about this if you were here,” she muttered. “You’d probably fare better against her than I would.”

Her only answer was the sighing of the wind. She wiped her hand clean and walked on.

The corpse wasn’t much further but she hadn’t seen anything out of the ordinary, though this was not a place to which she often ventured, for reasons as numerous as they were sensible. The ash piled in drifts and here and there she could see the legs of dead hoppers protruding from those mounds like segmented weeds. The gale from the lower tunnels whipped her cloak about her; she kept a protective hand on the horns as she continued her descent.

Before long, she could fall no further. In the distance could be seen the gaping hole of the Wyrm’s mouth, spewing forth the mildew-reeking wind that carried forth the pieces of its carapace, at once dead and undying. She knew that down this creature’s gullet was the egg from which its reincarnation had hatched; on long nights, she would sometimes reflect on the significance of it. This corpse was the closest she had ever come to seeing the Pale King in true, and it was no less inscrutable and silent than the monarch himself had been.

This wind was blinding. She ducked into a nearby crevice, battering away the flakes that had stuck to her cloak. They were reluctant to come loose. As though they were embracing her.

The Pale King had once seemed to her less a discrete entity and more the sum of his followers’ impressions, like a prism in reverse – all the talk and worship that swirled around him, the rumors and reverence and yes, the resentment, crystallizing into this lightborn creature, outwardly perfect but wracked with contradictions. Cold, distant, tormented, soft. For countless years she had convinced herself there was nothing of him to love, and despite the secrets that the White Lady had told her, she felt no regret for keeping him at bay. But part of her still wanted proof of what he’d really been. Some hint of his vulnerability. Like the one she’d witnessed at the Abyss’ edge, when the little ghost had ascended from the death-pit. That had been the crucial moment, and instead of seizing it, she had turned away and let it crumble in her hands like ash.

The King reduced to idol and memory. The Knight enshrined in stone. The Ghost emerging from darkness. Who were you. Who were you. Who were you.

She leaned around the corner and panned the rest of the tunnel, trying to catch a glimpse of something. The molt flew so thick that it was like trying to see through a cloud. She wondered if Rhea might have somehow made her hideaway within the corpse itself, where the King’s pearly egg rested like an altar – and then she looked closer.

There was a part of the wall, not far from here, where the wind blew oddly. The molt curved around it as if magnetically repulsed. She stepped out, one arm over her eyes, and two blinks later the world suddenly snapped out of joint – that innocuous cluster of stones the edge of an open tunnel, this meagre shadow became a yawning entryway. It made her head hurt trying to focus on it. And all around its perimeter, more of those glyphs were carved, smaller and chained by fine scratches like barbed wire, bleeding that liquefied dark. Both she and the little ghost had passed by here and never seen this entrance. Rhea’s spell had trapped it permanently in the corners of their vision.

Hornet went in.

The tunnel was pitch-black. Hornet had inherited some of the beasts’ night-vision, but she could still just barely gauge the dimensions of this space. It was cramped by Hallownest’s standards, maybe twice as tall as Hornet and three times as wide if she stood with arms outstretched, and every inch of it, walls and floor and ceiling, were scrawling with those conjoined and oozing symbols, darkness cracking open into deeper darkness still. She unslung her needle and cautiously pressed on.

The howl from the tunnel’s mouth became a whisper and then faded completely. The walls curved, dropped, curved again. For the first time in her life she felt the tickling of claustrophobia inside her chest; there was no way to gauge where she was or where she was headed. This place was sightless, soundless, even odorless. Some quietly panicking corner of her mind said it was the glyphs, of course it was them, they were made from the Abyss which asked for nothing and took everything it was given. Vacancy ripped into the world’s very flesh.

“You came.”

Hornet stopped dead. There was no sound to announce Rhea’s arrival, except that voice. Her mask became visible, a sallow whiteness in all this black, but not in any right way – it didn’t approach as if from a distance but simply _emerged_ , fading into view like a caul of darkness was being lifted from it. The holes drilled into that featureless oblong swayed and shifted with their owner, and slowly lowered to the ground. She was groveling.

“Princess,” she said. “Savior. Final scion of the eternal kingdom. There is no excuse for what I’ve done. No recompense. But if you can find it in your heart-”

“Get up,” Hornet said. The mask tilted up at her.

In that scraping posture, spearing her would be easy, but there was no guarantee it would be a killing blow, nor what would happen to Hornet if Rhea’s death was not instantaneous. The malformed shape of the Ancestral Mound still loomed large in her mind. Best to keep her talking. Maybe even instill some doubt. Her conversational skills were long-atrophied, but probably less so than Rhea’s.

“I know of your plans,” she said. “You intend to revive...” And here she had to force the word up through her gorge. “…my father.”

Reah shot up like she’d been jolted by electricity. Her movements were difficult for Hornet to discern, her body flitting among the blacker-than-black etchwork all through the tunnel, but her talons’ delighted clittering was like mad applause.

“Yes. Yes! It’s exactly as I hoped! You knew, and you came, to bear witness to the miracle, the convergence, all the years of…no, I’m rambling again. Please follow! There is quite a ways to go.”

She gripped the walls and scuttled away, moving through the tunnel in a wavering spiral. Just watching her made Hornet dizzy as she paced behind, Rhea babbling all the while.

“You may be curious as to the method. I am of the Abyss, as I’m sure you gathered, yes, the lowest reach, the All-Maw. No gods down there, not as your kind may understand them, just creatures very _large_ , very _significant_ , so much so that their mere thoughts were enough to distort the world. Not dissimilar from the Festerglow, you see? The incarnate form of the Radiance's fury, her cries for remembrance and release. So too it goes for Hallownest. You must have felt it yourself. The Usurper-King’s desire made manifest. That blessed halting of time.”

“Stasis born from a wish,” she murmured.

“Precisely! The defender-princess has a mind as great as her mettle!” Rhea tittered and twitched. “Oh, this kingdom and its King are _one_ , his beating heart and open eye, and from the former may the latter be manifested anew. The memories and prayers to his name have sunk into the very stones, sure as moss and mold and shadow, and what is a soul but memory given focus? I have traveled far, and left my marks, and the configuration of Void will permit the memory to flow, to converge and coalesce into the departed figure of its worship, and everything will yet again be illuminated by his unwavering light. And all I ask…all I ask…”

“Dreamer-knowledge,” said Hornet.

“Yes. The most trifling thing for him to grant. But all the world to me.”

“And if he doesn’t grant it, I’m sure that you can extract it by other means. Isn’t that right?”

“It would never come to that,” Rhea said – but, Hornet thought, far too quickly.

“My mother spoke of him. He cared deeply for this place. So much that, when he saw its fall to ruin was inevitable, he chose to turn his back on it and perish rather than witness its demise. That seems to have been a persistent flaw of his. He preferred that which might have caused him grief to remain unseen, and so, when grief became inescapable, he closed his eyes forever.” She stopped walking. “Do you think he’ll be so grateful to be dragged back out into what remains of his kingdom? This woeful husk?”

“The Festerglow is past.” Rhea had also gone still. “Hallownest may yet be salvaged. He of all people would understand that. There are lands outside this one that rise and fall to dust, subjected to the petty tyranny of time, but not Hallownest. All is remembered. All preserved. Death is not permitted here.”

“I have been neck-deep in death from the moment I stepped outside my home,” Hornet spat back. “And your carelessness has only added to it. In all the time you spent laying down your spells, did you never once think that the King’s stasis and his kingdom’s rot were one in the same? If Hallownest is proof of anything, it’s that death is inevitable.”

Rhea charged forward quick enough so that Hornet barely felt the wind of her approach before one of those talons hands clamped over her face and bore her to the ground, and another gripped her sword-arm, and more on her ankles and wrists; she was pinned, immobile, with Rhea’s mask hanging over her like a diseased moon.

“Death,” Rhea hissed, “is an _obscenity.”_

An endless moment passed. Then Rhea released her all at once and scurried to the ceiling, gouging fresh marks into the stone and her own carapace alike, so that Hornet, still prone, felt the pattering of blood from her wounds – blood that stained her cloak like oil and was cold to the touch.

“What do you know of my homeland?” said Rhea. “The land that was once this one, bathed in antiquated dark? The shadows so deep they became palpable and silken to the touch? The Celebration of Night where our shamans would don bangles of black glass and set the Abyssal Sea to shudder with their melody? The lighthouses carved to entreat the timeless ones beyond the umbral shores, whose shine would part the air like smoke, or the taste of coagulated Void supped upon during old rituals, that filled your throat with ecstatic pain and your eyes with such colors you would have never fathomed? And what of the lands outside, the titanic deserts and obsidian plains, the hillocks formed by grasping fingers and collapsing skulls of colossi long-buried, the stars screaming down as they wheeled across foreign earth that was _not mine, never mine_ , but witnessed nonetheless as I was chased out by that _whore-goddess_ and my kin were set alight by her gluttonous mind, and what would you know of them? The screams, the beseeching of gods that were not gods and heard and answered no prayer, the work and artistry of centuries blotted and burnt and buried? You know _nothing._ Only I do. They persist only in me.

“In my exile I came to understand. Death is but the first humiliation. The worse indignities follow, the forgetting, the unbegetting, the slow erosion under the deprecations of time, until all that you have cherished becomes nothing but a _shape_ , a meaningless whorl, the beauty and terror with which it had once been imbued departed surely as the fumes of putrefaction. This shall be tolerated no longer. Nothing was ever meant to die. Were I able, I would shelter every land as this one sheltered me, but this is all I can do. The Dreamer’s ritual will be recreated, so that I may sleep with those memories preserved. I will be remade into a temple for all I have lost. And the eternal kingdom will once again have the eternal monarch it rightly deserves.”

She flicked blood off her claws and finally, mercifully turned away.

“It’s not much farther,” she said. “Come, Princess.”

She ran off. Hornet followed, after forcing her hand to relax on her needle’s hilt. It had tightened so forcefully during Rhea’s ranting that her fingers felt ready to break.

She thought they couldn’t possibly be far from the Abyss itself now – the Wyrm's corpse was already quite deep, and this passage had been a gradual, winding descent. Or maybe conventional space wasn’t of any use here, surrounded by Rhea’s arts. They could have ventured into a place unreachable by any means, where all other tunnels dug would bypass it, into the dark heart of Hallownest itself. It was irrational, but the Void-born held sway over all here, and rationality was not something for which she had any use.

Then they arrived, and Hornet could only stare, a pit opening deep within her gut.

The cavern at tunnel’s end was a cathedral, a sloped and gargantuan cavity in the earth the shape of a halved egg, but Hornet couldn’t grasp its full enormity because it was coated in uninterrupted shadowy scrawl, a tapestry of mad calligraphy whose boiling dark further warped the dimensions in this lightless expanse. She thought she could hear whispering in its expectorations. And as she stood frozen at the entrance, Rhea crawled ahead to the chamber’s center, head darting in every direction, checking her sigils, finding them good.

“The work began here,” she said. “The nexus. Every line flawless. They exist beyond space, you know. Even if the walls and ceiling were to collapse, the marks would yet remain. But there is no need to worry about that. All of this is quite sturdy.” She turned back to Hornet. “I shall begin. Please stand clear, Princess. There is no danger, but when the King returns, it may be best to wait a moment before you make yourself known to him. It could come as a terrible shock.”

The sparks that Hornet’s needle-point made as it scraped the ground flared like dying stars. She stepped forward and swung her weapon up.

“Ah,” said Rhea. “I see.”

“Rhea of the Black Seventeen,” Hornet said. “You have made your convictions known, and I would find them admirable were they not so deranged. Hear me now: as Hallownest’s protector, and final descendent of its royal line, I shall end your ritual here.”

Rhea reared up, arms all spread wide, a black thread in a black canvas. She spoke with unnerving calm.

“You cannot harm me,” she said. “But neither am I so cruel as to slay a child before her own father. Throw yourself at me to your heart’s content. Once you have exhausted yourself, we shall resume.”

Hornet’s thread glinted. It lashed unseen grooves into the craze of sigils. Her only sound was the staccato patter of feet on stone as she rushed Rhea down and then she leapt, and leapt again, her thread snapping taut beneath her foot, and she whirled into the bug’s blind spot and came down at ballistic speed with her needle outstretched…

…and the cavern _changed._

The stone rippled like fabric and Hornet’s skull was seized in a vicegrip of vertiginous whirl as the dimensions around her became uncertain, Rhea’s floating mask rushing away as if borne off by riptide and the walls running like tallow and drooping in impossible angles, and she landed on ground that had gone uneven and heaving beneath her feet and she rose again with a defiant cry, threads anchoring and pulling her forward to where the sallow speck of mask now glinted and she spun about and prepared to slash but now the mask raised _up_ as if the earth beneath it had erupted and she felt her own body lurched in many directions at once, the sigils swirling around in phantasmagoric sprawl, and she squeezed her eyes shut and swung wild but even without sight the vertigo still addled her and when she opened them again the masks were everywhere, Rhea was scattered all about like the holes within her mask, and yet when she spoke sounded right before Hornet, and right behind, and right beside her ear:

“My domain lies wherever light cannot reach. You try to see me, but what is behind your eyes? Forlorn child, I am everywhere you can _think.”_

She vaulted to the nearest simulacrum of Rhea and swung high above and thrust a hand beneath her cloak, and in her wake trailed her caltrops now suspended on further threads; she touched ground and clenched her fist and pulled and those spiked spheres all converged upon their target, ready to gore and impale, but the darkness silently enfolded them and squeezed and then they were gone.

“Do you attack me out of retribution for your caretaker? Then your anger is righteous and welcome. You must remember her often, for in that act she will continue to exist. Never let her go. This is the burden we grievers must carry.”

These words, these masks, those taloned restless fingers, she could feel them all tap-tapping through her mind just like before, and this chamber was at once endless and so drawn-in that she couldn’t breathe. She made one final desperate leap and dove at the cluster of masks, but the ground rose up far sooner than it should have and she struck it hard and rolled, needle clattering at her side, and there she stayed with her cloak splayed out and hands pressed to her head, silently begging for this swirling to stop.

The masks coalesced, like reflections viewed in curved glass, as Rhea came toward her. Her voice remained gentle.

“That was quite a tumble. Are you unhurt?” she asked. “It would not do for you to injure yourself before…”

She stopped and stared. Hornet’s cloaked was raised up, revealing the tools and artifacts tied to the body beneath, and the twin horns’ milky shine was unnaturally vivid as if they produced a light of their own. Rhea’s tone shifted, into the same fascinated hunger that Hornet had last heard in Deepnest.

“That pale hue,” she said, and reached out. “Could those be…?”

“Don’t you _dare!”_ Hornet screamed.

Rhea flinched away at the whipcrack of Hornet’s voice and that gave her an opening. She grabbed at the first weapon she could touch and came away with that useless, bladeless nail-hilt, but she focused, envisioned the shining weave, and slashed out as the Dream-Nail’s blade burst forth; it cleaved right through Rhea’s segments and all at once Hornet’s mind was immersed in a wordless and oceanic misery and loneliness that she could no more fully comprehend than a dust-mote in a sunbeam could comprehend the sun, these sentiments not her own, transmitted through the blade, just as they had in in the black temple bound in thread with needle-pierce and unshut eyes full of feverish glow pooled across the mask so like her own and the recognition had not been hers it had not been-

No. No, this could not be remembered now.

Rhea was thrashing and howling even though her body was unmarked, her own mind apparently unused to such invasion. Hornet replaced the Dream Nail and pulled her needle to her hand and thrust forth but one of Rhea’s own hands flicked and she was thrown away by a hurricane blast of soundless pressure. She hit the ground skidding and saw that the room’s dimensions had snapped back into place, Rhea still too disoriented to reach back into her head. She acted on cunning sheened with feverish instinct. She drew the little ghost’s pale nail, jammed it into the ground, and charged at Rhea with a throat-rending roar.

Rhea turned to that noise and prepared to counter but hadn’t expected the needle’s arrival so soon; Hornet had leapt and hurled it and it streaked toward Rhea in a lethal silver line. Rhea’s finger flicked, the needle was deflected by that invisible force, but in its wake now came Hornet with the Dream Nail’s electric arc burning a trail through this suffocating shadow and she lashed out and once again came that burning icewater flood of misery, the ineffable loss, the sensation of all that she loved utterly destroyed, and Rhea again spasmed and clutched her mask as though struck by migraine. Hornet landed, rolled, clenched her fists, yanked hard, and just as Rhea was about to recover, the threadbound pure nail tore itself from the stones and streaked by her and kissed her upon the face.

The air was rent with hellacious shrieks. Rhea’s fingers dropped seizing and spurting blood, a gushing black line carved across her mask where the nail had cut clean through both it and the hands that had lain on it. Hornet didn’t hesitate. She caught the nail, sheathed it, and as Rhea struggled to adapt to the fresh devastation of her face, the defender-princess came down like a comet and plunged her needle into Rhea’s back.

There had never been a foe like this. There had never been one so hysterically clinging to life. Hornet’s head rang with the Void-born’s shrieking sobbing wails and that mangled rope of a body beneath rippled and jackknifed as she fought for balance and bore down, and she stabbed deeper even as freshets of that cold black blood erupted from the wound and drenched her cloak and dripped into the open holes of her mask, and she did not think that this was what murder felt like, the taking of a life in its totality, she thought of nothing at all because this was her duty and this was its fulfillment, and it would end only when this agonized noise was silenced, so she bore her full weight onto her weapon and hoped it would pierce whatever passed for this fugitive wretch’s heart so that she would _die,_ just _die_ , in the name of her dead father and all the dead gods before him, please just _die._

Then one of Rhea’s flailing hands touched Hornet’s ankle and before she could react she found herself ripped out and away and held up before that mask now half-eclipsed with blood, and Rhea screamed a word like the slamming of a mausoleum door and Hornet went still.

In the echoes of that word, Hornet could barely muster the movement to breathe. She had been afflicted by a paralysis like that found in the depths of night-terror, even her thoughts turned to sludge. Rhea tossed her aside like a broken doll and cupped her gushing wound; the needle had passed clean through, blood pooling on the stones, though the sigil’s darker black still burnt through it. Sprawled on the floor, Hornet could hear a deep and frantic muttering from Rhea in that cadaverous tongue, and her pitch rose and cracked as she swayed to its rhythmic rhyme, and at its crescendo she seized the two arms whose hands had been turned to stumps by Hornet’s nail and ripped them from the sockets. They tore free, gushing ichor like pollutive smoke, and at that same moment a corner of her mask burst apart in a shrapnel of blood and chitin, but she made no cry of pain this time, and before long all the wounds had closed – the arms, the mask, and the gouge made by Hornet.

Rhea sagged, let out a guttural moan, and then laughed, the sound jagged as her fragmented mask.

“Death must walk a winding road to find me. And I have misled it, time and again.” She turned to Hornet, still insensate. “A cruder version of the spell I used to survive in the wastes. There is pain, a bit of mutilation, but what does that compare to eternity?”

Rhea snatched up the needle and cupped Hornet by the back of her head as if ready to kiss her goodnight. The flesh behind her broken mask was a writhing tarry pulp. Its flyblown reek would have made Hornet’s stomach revolt were it not as paralyzed as the rest of her.

“My own woeful husk has withstood the ravages of _eons._ You and your little trinket can hardly compare. Now stay there and behave, or I shall break _you_ in a fashion not so easily mended.”

She threw the needle down and crawled to the center of the cavern. Her gait was unsteady, owing to her newly missing limbs, but she pulled herself along all the same.

“The time for grievances is over,” she said. “Now comes the restoration.”

And Hornet watched, helplessly, as Rhea lowered herself to the first of hundreds of glyphs, and cooed into that waiting dark.

At the sound of her voice the oozing lines gushed and smoldered, and all the surrounding shadows seemed to tremble. Rhea moved to the next and spoke, and it did the same. Then she moved to the next, and the next, faster now, the eldritch syllables coaxing her abyssal configuration to terrible life, and already she was moving so fast that there was scarcely breath between her speech and now she was running, a streak of liquid dark that spiraled through the cavern and gibbered the glyphs into frenzy. Hornet’s finger twitched, she struggled to regain control of herself, but it was like pulling oneself out of a deep nightmare and she still couldn’t reach for her needle; meanwhile Rhea’s procession had already reached the ceiling and was returning down and every glyph now roared like an open furnace and suffused this already-lightless kingdom with a greasy darkness that obliterated even Hornet’s night vision, and just her hand finally closed around her needle-hilt Rhea returned to the circle’s center and seized stiff, every arm spread wide, her final incantation raised into a screech that tore through Hornet like a sawblade.

Hallownest resonated with that sound. The spilling dark carried to the glyphs in the outer tunnel, and to others leading to this dark heart in passages unseen, and from there it jumped to the markings carved into the Fungal Caverns and the City of Tears and Greenpath and the Crossroads and everywhere in between, all vomiting forth their blackness channeled through the Abyss’ fathomless depths. Those who were sensitive to its emanations were overcome by an awful chill. But it passed, as did the blackness; in seconds, that smoking dark had stopped erupting from the glyphs.

In its place came pale light.

It glowed first in the glyphs at the kingdom’s outer edges, so faint and fine as to be nearly undetectable. But it, too, was carried on, rushing from symbol to symbol and growing brighter all the while, spilling across Hallownest with the deceptive and unstoppable speed of a breaking dawn, and by the time it raced through Kingdom’s Edge and back down the tunnel it had gone blinding. Hornet jammed her needle into the stones and pushed herself to her knees only to see the ground underfoot glow white, the light following Rhea’s coiling spiral. It converged. It coalesced.

“It is done!” Rhea howled triumphantly. “King of Hallownest, in grace and clemency, _I welcome you home!”_

The light grew until Hornet couldn’t look directly at it, and when she shut her eyes, it still burnt through the lids. But then it abated, and when she opened them again, he was there.

Smaller than Knight, larger than Ghost. That was the first thought that came to her mind, leaping to those easy comparisons, and from there it was possible to see the other features of both within him – the same color to his shell, yes, but also the same gentle curvature of his mask, and weren’t those downturned eyeholes so similar to the ones she saw every time she glimpsed her own reflection? His robe was a sheen of ivory and the angles of his crown caught the light he emanated and sparkled mesmerically, and even from this distance Hornet could see that the body creating that light was solid, see the slow and shallow rise and fall of his chest. This was no phantom, but the Pale King in flesh and shell, reborn.

He didn’t move as Rhea groveled before him, nor did he acknowledge Hornet. His gaze was fixed to some vague point on the ground. All around the cavern, the glyphs continued emitting that soft light.

“Pale King,” Rhea said. “Forgive my unsightly appearance. I am the one who revived you. Your kingdom awaits, damaged a bit, yes, but still whole, still containing space for such hopes, like myself. There are yet those who will rejoice at your coming. Even your daughter is here to welcome you.” Hesitantly, she raised her head. “I would ask a boon of you, but that can wait. There is only time now for your eternal domain. Have I done well, my King? Are you well?”

The King didn’t answer. Hornet stayed riveted to the spot. And after a moment, she saw Rhea go limp, fall over, and lie still.

At first Hornet believed that it had been a result of the wound she’d inflicted – that Rhea’s spell hadn’t been potent enough to fully divert her death. But then she noticed Rhea’s shell crack and flake, the flesh underneath doing the same, bleeding at first before it crumbled into desiccation, and now all around her she heard an eggshell crackle and saw the stones start to fracture. The first of them broke loose from the ceiling and crashed down, and it quickly weathered into dust before her eyes. The King stood. Hornet watched her needle develop a patina of tarnish darkening to black at its edges, and a single long crack ran across its blade. The King stared. The cavern fissured and trembled and where it fell away the sigils continued to glow, unmoored from their surfaces, and already Rhea’s corpse was a pile of bloody detritus. The King.

Hornet couldn’t breathe. No matter how she tried there wasn’t enough air. Her cloak rotted and unraveled. She felt herself fragile as dry straw and the needle’s fracture began to sprout spiderwebbing offspring. The floor beneath the King fell away and still he remained, suspended on the glyphs that filled everything with their shine, and that shine carried an eye-watering sound, a waterglass hum, and there was another sound far beneath it, still indefinable but rapidly growing, but before it could become known to her and annihilate her in the knowing it was cut out by another noise still, a roaring cacophany of wagon-wheels. Something grabbed Hornet by the neck and pulled, and then she witnessed no more.


	6. Chapter 6

At the mouth of the divine corpse, the wind ceased to blow.

That howling gale had been at the Pale King’s back when he’d first emerged from the cocoon in his prior incarnation’s guts, a death rattle that had persisted for generations, but when the black scrawl at the entrance to Rhea’s hideaway began to glow white, that breath ebbed away. In its absence the molt-fall drifted downward as if suddenly unsure of what to do with itself, and once it settled, no more followed – it had all been carried out by the wind, peeling bits off the Wyrm’s ever-shedding carapace. Not long after the air cleared, that shell sagged, its ring of teeth glazing with cracks, and then it collapsed like the skin of ash it had always truly been.

The light shined. It spilled from Rhea’s sigils along with that thin, high sound and trailed fairy-wisps around the cavern, and its pure note was soon drowned out by an eggshell crackle. The stone fissured and split, its crevices trickled dust like drool from an invalid’s mouth, and then it fell apart, in pebbles at first, then fistfuls, preludes to the avalanche that would follow. Cracks opened in the earth below the dunes of molt and the molt swirled like water down a plughole, exposing the corpses of deceased bugs and beasts who also crumbled to dust as they went, and the light shined and shined.

“For all things, a conclusion.”

The Colosseum of Fools, once again filled with the bodies that had been temporarily banished by the Grimm Troupe’s flame, broke open as if the carcass that housed it had been struck by a thunderbolt; the deceased Fools fell from its like hailstones with the flurries of bloodied sand. The Little Fool tumbled with his chain still rusting around his middle, and both collapsed to dust in midair, while the Lord Fool desiccated upon his throne. The stands crumbled, their spectators joining the warriors on their descent, all made one as they massed and mixed in the far-off sewage which itself drained as the earth beneath it opened up, a gray slurry that slithered into the new canyons. Farther away, the Hive fell level by level, its long seclusion ended last, the fluid that spewed from its ruptured sides filling the air with its saccharine reek. 

None of this was known to Bardoon. He felt only the rumble around his mass, the alien harmonics running through stones in which he’d encased himself for years beyond counting. It was enough.

“Difficult, for a mind to conceive of its own ending. As the mind grows, so does the difficulty. And the means of resistance, hrmm. But as we hold our death at bay, it also grows, in fangs and eagerness and appetite. Perhaps better to face it plain. Be known to it. Not capitulation, but transformation. To see what will become of us on the other side of the inevitable.”

The Void-born witch had left her marks here, too, and Bardoon stared them down, even as his mask glazed with cracks and his elephantine skin wrinkled like parchment.

“Rhea. If I had understood this sooner…if I had spoken of it to you…would that have made a difference?”

The only answer came in that waterglass whine. Bardoon sighed, and the folds of his meat consumed his mask completely. Not long after, the cavern grew too weak to contain him any longer; he dislodged with a monumental cacophony and descended in a slow, balletic twirl, and tore the underside of Kingdom’s Edge wide open in his landing, a crash that reverberated through the whole rotting structure and buried what remained of the Wyrm’s corpse with a tectonic bone-rattling rumble that would not be heard, by anyone, now or ever.

* * *

The pale light had beaten against Deepnest’s gates for centuries, in the form of honey-tongued emissaries and new technologies and veiled threats, and at last it found its way in. It pushed its fingers through those corridors, the sigils’ glow burning in the lightless depths, and carried with it the touch of rot. The garpede corpses came apart segment by segment, shells and mandibles thought unbreakable by even the finest of bug-forged weapons flaking away like a paper held to a flame. The corpse-creepers and the bodies in which they dwelled cracked in quick succession, one-two like nesting dolls, and their dust mixed and spilled away as the floor beneath them fell. The mounds of dead beasts at the entrance to Mantis Village became unanimous almost at once, their pieces breaking and merging like the scraped remains of a funeral pyre. Every gate flung wide, all defenses breached.

In the distant village of the Weaver tribe, the great constructions of silk accepted the light with as much dignity as they could muster. Their faded colors decayed further into a jaundiced yellow and then the threads broke one after the other, the hanging homes tilting wildly on their suspensions and disgorging tools and books and the bodies of the slain, and the plucking twang of snapped silk made for the Weavers’ final song, a departing hymn to their peerless creativity. A canopy of thread, upon which Hornet and her mother had once sat and spoken of the unraveling future, severed from its moorings and drifted into the black water below. Inside the Beast’s Den, the candles all blew out, and the corpses of Beast and Midwife were buried in darkness, buried again in the collapsing tomb, and then buried a final time, beneath water and silk and what remained of the kin whom they’d cared and sacrificed for all throughout Hallownest’s encroaching days.

In Deepnest’s higher passages, the Mask Maker’s chisel shattered.

He had been working on the same mask that he had begun during Hornet’s last conversation with him, already finely formed, two horns curling from the chitin and the fang-impressions well on their way to being smoothed. His tools had lasted for years of tireless labor without complaint, but the chisel broke easily as an old twig, and with its busy tap-tapping silenced he could hear the new and gentle sounds behind him, like bread-crust in a clenched hand. He turned from his workbench and saw his masks disintegrating, every face now alike in its decrepitude. Horns broke. Fangs chipped. One fell off its shelf and shattered, spraying the ground with shards that fell into other widening cracks.

The Mask Maker walked among them, head tilted thoughtfully. His pace was easy and slow and didn’t change even when his own mask broke, or the face beneath began to bleed, or his shell split like old fruit. Even when one of his arms slipped from its socket and the ceiling broke apart in scaly patterns, titanic slabs of rock about to fall, he listened.

“That sound,” he said. “Of course. Death wears love for a face.”

* * *

Greenpath’s residents might have died with the Radiance, but the land itself had clutched onto the same unfettered, riotous life as it had during the kingdom’s height, and when the light emerged it was the land itself that responded, convulsing and curling into itself like one in the grip of rigor mortis. Brambles turned thin and brown as ropes and fell to pieces beneath their own weight. Flowers bent forlornly, shedding petals; the fool-eaters did the same, their fanged mouths slightly open as if wordlessly asking what had come over them. All this deceased matter became tasteless fertilizer for soil that would no longer tolerate the roots that it had once patiently fed. Not even scent survived. There was no fading pollen or sweet rot. The smell that filled Greenpath was the same that now pervaded everywhere else – dried bone, attic dust.

Leaves browned and broke off and drifted in a withered imitation of the Wyrm’s molt, and fluttered into the pools of hissing acid that themselves drained out through the endless fissures and further dissolved and gutted all beneath, the whole land turning hollow. Further away, in Fog Canyon (oomas and uomas alike having perished without even corpses to mark their passing, only the vegetation being taken by the light’s grasp), the Teacher’s Archives were filled with a fusillade of tinkling glass, its accumulated acid-written knowledge released from its confinement, spilling from the shelves like a liquefied mind’s dribble from a perforated skull; Monomon herself burst from her fractured capsule to bubble and ooze on the acid-scoured tiles, her tentacles fanned about her in beached splay. The lake of acid that had been the departed Unn’s domain drained with a viperous hiss and worked its way down, down.

The Queen’s Gardens were likewise ravaged, the bodies of traitorous mantises sifting into the soil, the carpets of spiked creepers shedding their brambles as they flaked to dust. The greenhouses’ metal ribs rusted and bent and their glassy skins broke in sympathy. Only a cluster of white flowers scattered around an unmarked grave resisted the light, their petals even seeming to glow brighter in defiance, but then the gravestone itself decayed and rocked on its foundation and toppled, crushing half the plants, and the surrounding vines broke free and their crumbling spines lashed the ground and tore at the survivors until none remained.

The White Lady stirred in her cocoon.

She felt impressions of the wrongness about her but such was its size that its nature was yet difficult to grasp; her roots teased only at its edges, her mind made sluggish by long captivity. She contemplated this sensation like a complicated mathematical proof. Then her blind eyes widened, and bent low, watching the ground. She held that pose, waiting, and then began to speak.

“Do you remember the days of our courting?” she asked. “So impossibly long ago. You were majestic, naturally, and lavished me in such gifts and promises, but I never did tell you what had first caught my eye. The most profound loneliness. I was pulled to it surely as these roots sought water.”

The only light that filled this chamber was her own. But outside, the sigils hummed, and Dryya’s armor turned to tarnish.

“That loneliness is why you sought me too, wasn’t it? My body spread so far, and would never be far from your own. I had long grown tired of haughty and imperious gods content in their solitude, but you were so vulnerable. So close to mortal. It was that tenderness I treasured in you most of all. The same that you passed on to your child.” Her bindings discolored, mildewed. “So I am sorry. For leaving, for indulging my own weakness. I couldn’t bear the change of everything after the seal was built, and thought, foolishly, that you would have seen me as I believed you always had, seen that even from my cell in this place, I would still be close to you. Only when you disappeared did I realize my mistake, and spent all the years after reflecting on the bodies that spread beneath my canopy. Yours atop all the other little ones. But here you are. As I’d always prayed, even though a god’s prayers have no one to answer.”

The White Lady’s arms slipped free of their wrappings and reached out, palms up, as if begging for alms. She cupped nothingness and her shimmering skin dulled, sheened with cataract the same as her eyes, which now ran with tears that dotted the soil like crushed pearl.

“Oh, my love, why is it that you weep? I’m here. I’ve been here, at your side. All along.”

Outside the cocoon all was now the color of bark turning to char. The roots emerging lost their glow, turned sallow, runneled with gnarl; they stiffened arthritically and then were still. The chamber’s upper reach hissed and fumed not long after, and then dripped, speckling the soil with corrosion. That was the only prelude before it gave way all at once, Unn’s acid cascading down in a river that passed through and dissolved the craftwork of the White Lady’s prison like ice, a slight distraction on its way to further territories – one god’s domain blotting out another’s, as it had always been.

* * *

The sands at the Blue Lake’s shore shuddered. A tumble of individual grain, then a trickle, empty capillaries opening up in the sand. The lakewaters bubbled a bit like something beneath had expelled air. Under the substrate of corpses, the earth was opening like infected skin. Pale light whispered open-sesames into the seams.

Were it not for the dancing sands then the lake’s draining would have been imperceptible at first, but the grains ran down with hourglass eagerness and disrupted the treasures that they had carried within – smooth shells, stray pebbles, geo dropped from the purses of picnickers in times long gone. The abandoned nail jerked and fell over and slid into the water like it was pulled on a fishing-line and drifted down to join the masses of packed and black-eyed bodies of every configuration and now the ceiling also began to drop in scales, coffin-lids of stone lying upon ground that was no longer fit to bear the weight, and the lake drained with a static susurrus like a momentous cheer, like the spectators of bloodsport awaiting the descending blade.

(This was heard by Salubra, who had reclined smiling and silent in her shop, idly handling her glass-bauble jewelry as it broke apart in her softening palms. The little hamlet outside had gone to dust, an outward death to match the emptiness it had borne all these years. She knew, of course, had always known, though there had been long stretches of time where she had convinced herself to forget. These people had always treated her well and it had never seemed fair, not right, to leave the space where they’d been to molder in silence when instead it could have been filled with perfume and mirth, to remain remembered. But it slid away in clots now, and she felt her body no longer able to maintain its own shape. Somewhere deep within her dissolving mass was a pinprick of warmth, a coalescing wish, and she gazed up as the sky fell and hoped that it would be beautiful.)

The City of Tears buckled. The rainbeat of centuries interrupted. Instead of that patter was now water sleeting in sheets from cavern-ceiling too high to be seen and it struck gutters never meant to bear such weight. The city was surprised by this new rhythm and swayed drunkenly with spires now gone rust-raddled and cobblestones cracking as if trod by invisible behemoths. One of the first things to be covered by water was the Lady Emilitia, face-down upon her sumptuous carpet. As her flowers had wilted around her, she’d murmured about the terrible draft that had come tonight, and asked for someone to please shut the door.

The Watcher’s Spire was the first to bend and its windows burst outward to expel master, servant, and telescope, spitting them like loose teeth to twirl through the deluge and into alleyways swallowed by coursing blue. The city seized, it warped, it clenched in on itself, and the windows shattered and eaves crumbled and windows flung themselves wide to better admit the water carrying away its quarry, everything now drowning in fresh percussion of popping rivets and the steel-on-steel screech, the groaning quake of collapsing aqueducts underfoot as they vomited up their own stagnant water to burst through the flooded streets. The City of Tears, so unused to death, admitted the flood like a blade between the ribs, and amidst the city’s thrashing caterwaul, the flood reached in and took all it could.

The flood took a hoard of relics from a certain shop already half-gone, tarnished idols and splintered stone diaries and eggs of antiquated make that were breaking open to reveal indecipherable secrets never to be seen. The flood took the jellied and bloated bodies from the heretical sanctum high above. The flood took the aromatic water of the Pleasure House’s higher reaches, and the flood took the reeking stockpile of butchered and blank-eyed meat from the storerooms far below. The flood took pots of stagnant food, letter-paper reduced to pulp, hidden shrines devoted to foreign gods, concealed cellars plotting futile treason, portraits and tapestries marred with mold, shellwood toys lurking beneath couches. The flood took the libraries, the atriums, the gardens, the gazebos, the barracks, the armories, the guardhouses, the penthouses, the schoolyards, the marketplaces, the hospitals, the jails, the smithies, the eateries, the galleries, the refineries, the distilleries, the tanneries, the clothiers, the cafés, the chemists, the cathedrals. The flood took candlesticks, broomsticks, keys, cushions, notebooks, lockets, wine bottles, jam jars, brooches, bangles, buckets, baskets, earrings, scarves, shawls, shoes, soap, spoons, pepperpots, dishtowels, lampshades, curtains, carpets, bedframes, picture-frames, nightstands, teacups, luggage, earrings, eyeglasses, wedding bands, flowerpots, firewood, coal, quills, inkwells, dolls, dishes, dustpans, grain, gowns, needles, thread, thimbles, shears, shields, skillets, money, mirrors, matchsticks, medicine.

And so on and on and on and so.

The memorial fountain was not the last part of the city to die, nor the first. It splintered the same as all else as the floodwaters were joined by the clusters of the long-drowned, the Knight’s mask cracking in patterns of scrawl only for the whole structure to be smashed by a toppled spire now rendered indistinguishable to all its fellows. Its refuse joined the rest and continued into the pound and howl of the sewers beneath, to the catacombic garbage-pits where all items of all origins were stripped of their significance, all sentiment expunged, so that what remained was a sort of corporealized dementia, a homogenous gunk – until everything that was terrible or beautiful or secret or sacred or cherished or priceless or pointless or worthless or worn was transfigured, at last and only, into something that _was_ , that _was_ , that _was._

* * *

In Dirtmouth, the hamlet on Hallownest’s skin, the survivors tallied up their belongings. Cornifer had his maps, rolled within each other and sealed in weatherproofed cylinders, while Iselda busied herself with items that would actually help them survive on the road, canteens and bedrolls and preserved food. Sly, though he still insisted that he had no intention of leaving, busily fetched improbable heaps of goods from his shop’s storeroom, laying them out as if he could convince the outgoing bugs to buy something at a reasonable price. Sheo had his paints and easel, and the few blank canvases he’d taken from his studio; the Nailsmith cradled a long, thin wooden box beneath one arm, freshly varnished, bronze hinges gleaming. The others owned nothing of note, though the Elderbug kept pacing, one hand on the jarred flower like he was soothing an anxious pet. Oro and Mato stared at Sly’s mound of merchandise – rolls of fabric, unlit lanterns, lumafly-feed, tins of meat and tea and tobacco – with growing concern.

“Do you intend to put all of this back at some point, Master?” asked Mato.

“Perhaps if you’d so kindly guide Iselda and Cornifer this way, my burden would be reduced.” Sly perused a small ledger so crammed with figures its pages were almost solid black.

“We’re not your salesmen,” said Oro. “Or your pack-weevils, for that matter. Why do you still insist on playing the merchant? You wouldn’t be so agitated right now if you actually planned to stay here.”

“I’ve been on the road before, dear student, which is more than could be said for either of you. I wouldn’t be dragging all of this along with me in that case. Converting it to lovely, lightweight geo is a different story.”

Mato had been circumnavigating the pile, and he pulled out a long-handled greatnail, its blade still dusty with disuse. “Master, is this…?”

“Oh! Ah. Erm, well.” He tossed his ledger into the stacks. “You know how it is, haven’t used the silly thing in forever, could be a memento for someone, particularly of historical note…”

“No one here could possibly want to buy that,” said Oro, in leaden tones. “Is there something you’re not telling us, Nailsage?”

Sly looked past him, in the direction of the brooding well. He shuffled in place. This sudden display of uncertainty actually thawed Oro, a little – he exchanged a silent glance with Mato, his shoulders stooped.

_“Sly, help us!”_

Cornifer’s cry knifed across the village and made all three of them jump, and in its echo followed the first tremor, the earth groaning beneath their feet.

“Earthquake?” Mato asked.

“One thing at a time,” said Sly. “Let’s go to them.”

The mapmaking couple wasn’t far from the village bench, having gathered there with the other survivors – Jiji, Sheo, the Nailsmith, and the Elderbug. But now all of them were clustered around the Confessor, and as Sly approached, they parted so he could see why. The old bug was shaking so violently it seemed she might simply fly apart, every bit of her fighting to go in a different direction. Tremulous moans leaked from behind her collar.

“She’s having some kind of fit!” said Iselda. “I don’t know what to do!”

“Calm yourself, dear,” Cornifer said, though he wasn’t looking much better. “Sly, Iselda knows only field medicine but I daresay that’s more than the rest of us. Do you have anything that could quell this?”

“I’m not sure. Especially if it’s the Confessor we’re talking about. Give us space.” He hopped up to Jiji, whose shaking had lessened somewhat. “Confessor, can you hear me?”

“Black ocean from pale mind,” Jiji muttered. “Untended. Congealed to vitriol. A calamitous stain on the fools, the shimmer, the gardens, the twisting repose, and I…I feel…most unwell…”

She convulsed and hacked out a burst of tarry fluid, making them all recoil, and then fell to her knees. Cornifer rushed to her side, but she shrugged him off.

“Flee,” she said, and coughed again. “There are so many leaks, and so close. It comes.”

The ground heaved, hard enough to make several of them stumble. Sheo steadied the Nailsmith, who was clutching that box like a lifeline. Cracks had opened up around the bench’s feet. From somewhere deep below was noise that harmonized in all their guts and made the houses tremble, a basso cannonade.

“What’s going on?” the Elderbug asked querulously. “There was never anything like this before. The kingdom was supposed to be safe!”

“Still haven’t seen the princess,” the Nailsmith said.

“We can’t just leave her,” said Sheo. “We wouldn’t even be here if not for her and the-”

There was a third crash, this one less immense but also far closer, a tremendous clattering like a pile of toppled stovewood. The more perceptive of them could hear something else underneath it. The tinny note of a rung bell.

“What was that, now?” Sheo asked.

“I have an inkling,” Sly said grimly. “Sheo, see to the Confessor. Oro, Mato, with me!”

He braced himself and then sprang off with such force that he turned into a blue-black blur against the evening gloom. In the distance was the rustle of upset merchandise, and then Sly pinwheeled back onto the scene with his greatnail in tow; he landed in front of the stag station hard enough to crater the earth and the blade flashed, tearing the entryway open wide. Several of them gaped. Even when Sly had taken that weapon up after the Radiance’s death, they hadn’t been privileged enough to actually see him swing it. Mato and Oro, galvanized by the sight, gripped their own nails and followed Sly into the station’s darkness.

“We should get to the village entrance,” said Sheo. He knelt beside Jiji, hands on her shoulders. “Madame, can you walk?”

“Why the entrance?” asked Cornifer.

“The whole evening, Master kept stealing glances at that well. I don’t know why, but I’ve also been filled with unease. The same as you, Cornifer.”

“The same as us all,” said the Nailsmith. “It isn’t just Hornet’s disappearance. There’s a wrongness beneath the earth this night.”

“My thoughts exactly. And the well is an opening right into it. I feel about as safe beside that thing right now as I would with a leaky acid-barrel.”

“Your warrior’s instincts haven’t left you.”

Sheo gave a look at the box he carried. “The people we used to be are not so easily cast aside.”

They didn’t get far. There was a silky scraping from behind them, and they looked back to see the station’s entrance slashed open even further. Sly whirled out of that blackness and then dropped to his knees, almost crushed by his toppling greatnail as he violently coughed. Oro and Mato came out just behind him, looking no better for wear, and bent under a reddish and malformed shape that they could almost but not quite recognize. Then Iselda clapped her hands over her mouth and let out a choked scream, and they all understood why.

The old stag’s horn had snapped off at the base and two of his legs were bent at hideous angles; his shell was water-slicked but in numerous places looked to have simply crumbled away like salt crystals, revealing the bloody meat beneath. His whiskers were blood-tinted and his breath was like the wheeze of failing machinery, and though the brothers set him down as gently as they could, he didn’t make any attempt to rise. He lay on his side, seizing and hacking, as Oro and Mato staggered away.

“Brothers!” Sheo cried, running to them. “Are you all right? What in all the gods’ names is happening down there?!”

“Something wicked,” Oro said, and coughed into his palm. He looked at the bloody flecks there with dismay.

“It was like inhaling poison,” Mato said hoarsely. “Master and Hornet had devised a plan to bring the stag here in case he wanted to go. Cut the elevator’s counterweight so we could winch him up ourselves. If we’d taken any longer…”

“It will pass.” Jiji made it two shaky steps before collapsing again. “But we are not safe. I can feel the stain spread further, faster.”

The Nailsmith remained with the increasingly frazzled Elderbug, as Cornifer and Iselda knelt beside the crippled stag. Sly forced himself up and limped over to join him. He ran his small hands over that ruined shell.

“I can fix this,” he said. “Think, think. All those goods and nothing to treat a damned wound? What use am I if I can’t keep proper inventory?”

The stag’s head lolled. “Nailsage. Is that you?”

“Yes, stag. We’re all here.”

“Ah. So you are. Hello, miss.” He looked at Iselda. “Apologies. For my shabby state.”

Iselda stroked his craggy head. “Don’t talk. We’re going to patch you up, understand?”

“Have to speak. Came to deliver a message. From the princess.”

“Hornet?” Sly asked. The others had gathered around, now. “She’s still down there?”

“Wanted you all to leave without her. Rather obvious, now. I think she was trying to stop this.” He coughed, grimaced, his shattered legs spasming. “Told me to run back the moment something seemed awry, and I did, but I was too slow once again. Hallownest is thrashing apart. The tracks split open, and I stumbled…heh, but I made it in the end.”

Cornifer leaned in. “Stag, is she okay? Do you have any way of knowing?”

“She yet lives, I’m sure of it. That girl bears the last of this kingdom’s royalty in her blood. She wouldn’t succumb so easily.” His one visible eye now lanced directly heavenward. “So that’s the sky, eh? Don’t see what all the fuss is about. The air, though…the air is sweeter here. I fulfilled every purpose, every passenger, and I was even able to visit the surface. Quite a journey for one of my kind.” He chuckled. “If you should meet any other stags, tell them about me, won’t you? Hallownest’s faithful servant. I was old and slow, but I was not the last. Not the last.”

His legs made one final weak kick, as if galloping down a track unseen, and then went still.

In the direction of Crystal Peak came another colossal rumble, this time unmuffled by the earth. They watched in silent horror as the mountain’s outer layer fell like sloughing skin to reveal innumerable pinpoints of twinkling light, a cancerous constellation, and they braced themselves as those falling rocks smashed into the graveyard nearby. Then the gravestones themselves disappeared, and the iron fencing beyond, falling away into darkness. The ground itself had split open, swallowing everything, and that maw grew wider by the minute. The Elderbug fell to his knees, weeping incoherent prayer, and Jiji limped to his side and laid her hands on his shoulders. Cornifer and Iselda embraced. All of them were transfixed by the coming devastation.

“Mato. Sheo.”

Oro stood at the front of the group, nail point-down, hands on his hilt. He didn’t look at either of them.

“We have had our disagreements,” he said. “Ones which I am not prepared to concede. But whatever awaits us tonight…it is good to be here with you.”

A moment passed. Then Sheo ran forward and threw his arms around Oro, who grunted and swayed in place, refusing to release his nail, especially when Mato placed an awkward hand on his shoulder. Sly regarded the brothers, straightened his back, and looked to Jiji.

“Confessor, the Howling Peaks lie outside this kingdom’s borders. Could we find safe passage there?”

“I don’t know.” She helped the trembling Elderbug to his feet. “But I sense no stain behind us. Not yet.”

“Then that is where we shall go. To the borderland wastes, and further if necessary. I’m sorry, Iselda, but we don’t have time to bury him.”

She wiped her eyes. “I understand. My supplies are nearby. Cornifer, did you-”

“The maps are just beside your luggage, dear, don’t worry.”

“But we can’t leave,” said the Elderbug. The brothers broke their hug and stared at him, bewildered. “The King’s curse. What will become of us?”

“I’ll chance it,” said Mato. “I was born here, elder one, the same as you. But I have no use for a mind contingent on remaining in this deathtrap.”

“We have each other,” said the Nailsmith. His hand found Sheo’s. “The King cannot take that from us.”

“And that’s doubly true for those of us who are not natives to this land,” said Cornifer. “I assure you, Elderbug, that whatever happens, you won’t be abandoned to your fate.”

Sly fetched his greatnail and slung it across his shoulders. His knees buckled from the sudden weight, his body still weakened from the decaying atmosphere below, but he spat and steadied himself again.

“Sheo, Nailsmith, bring the elder ones to the entrance and wait for us there. Cornifer, Iselda, grab your belongings. As for you, my students, there should be some rucksacks among my wares further in the village. Fill them as full as you can, as fast as you can, and join the others. We’ll need enough to survive whatever’s out there.”

“If we make it out,” said Oro.

“We will. I swear this on my honor and reputation, as Nailsage, teacher, and merchant alike. I will cleave these mountains in _twain_ if I must.”

That pronunciation was enough to get them moving. Iselda stood over the stag’s corpse for a second longer, and then turned away to join her husband. Sly watched the mountain. It had shed far more of its mass while they’d talked, now a purple-glimmered stump, like a tooth beset by a whole new sort of exotic infection. As he watched, the huts nearest to the cemetery slid back into the widening hole, and he couldn’t even hear the crash that would have followed their landing. The entire kingdom had been hollowed out like a rotted nut.

“Best of luck, wherever you are,” he said, and went to help his people.

* * *

_The Abyss possessed its own breed of darkness._

_Hornet hadn’t known what to expect when she had crossed the newly unsealed threshold. The Abyss was unfathomably ancient and filled with shadow, but other than that, not even the Weavers had anything to share about its nature. Herrah had been become privy to the warped experiments that the King had undertaken with this place, dredging up the primordial void to refashion it into devices, automata, and, at last, the shells of his own spawn, but of the Abyss itself, she had been ignorant as everyone else. It consumed everything it touched – light, sound, secrets._

_Hornet’s night vision was bewildered by it. This was, of course, no ordinary dark, and in places it couldn’t be called properly_ dark _at all, merely an intervening space where no proper light existed but visibility was perfectly fine, striated with zones of black so absolute that she thought if she put her hand into one then it would come away as a stump, dissolved into shadow. Above were streamers of hanging vegetation that had been strikingly changed by the Abyss’ atmosphere, becoming black banners whose surfaces crawled and ran like the film on oil. But what lay underneath was of far greater concern. Evidence of the Pale King’s despoilment. The refuse and the regret._

_Impossible to tell where the geography began or ended. Every outcropping and hillock was crusted by them, these malformed diminutive bodies joined jigsaw in their struggle to reach the overlook. They lay packed so tight that Hornet’s needle would not have fit between some spaces, and they continued down further than she could see – and, she had no doubt, much further still, the Abyss now bearing countless strata of shells which had never been truly alive or dead. According to Herrah, she had asked the Pale King during their consort just how many had been sacrificed to wring a proper vessel from their number, and he had just stared, and stared, until the icy pit in her stomach had given her an answer._

_The silence here was so thick that it held her head in a vicegrip. Her breath and the thunder of her heart were all she had to anchor her. When she finally did hear the sounds she had expected from below, they were much too faint, and gave no echo, the cavern walls drinking it away. That bobbing, blank-eyed mask emerged._

_After the little ghost had thrashed her at Kingdom’s Edge, she’d watched it make off with the icon of power housed in the divine corpse, and had been shadowing it ever since. If it had become aware of the Brand, then its meanderings would inevitably take it to the Abyss. What purpose it would find after that was still a mystery to her, but it was Void-born, and if it could somehow tap into the reservoirs of darkness beneath then it would be much empowered – and as it had demonstrated during their last fight, it was quite powerful already. Maybe, Hornet thought, its wandering could lead it to banish this hellish infection in a more permanent sense._

_The ghost’s stare was fixed on Hornet, like her mask had become a beacon for it. It was having trouble with this uneven terrain, and its hesitant, fumbling movements were quite unlike what she’d seen during their clashes. She watched as it leapt and grabbed onto a protruding horn, which then snapped off and sent it tumbling back into the darkness. She made no move to aid it. If it could defeat her in combat so effortlessly, then this ascent should be nothing._

_Eventually it clambered onto the platform and looked up at her, hands at its sides. Something about its face – or what passed for one – was still disconcerting. Unclear exactly how much awareness these things had. The black holes in its mask absorbed conversation like geo dropped into a wishing-well. But its body, shell still soft and unformed, now coursed with wisping void. It had found a prize down there with its kin._

_“Ghost. I see you've faced the place of your birth, and now drape yourself in the substance of its shadow. Though our strength is born of similar source, that part of you, that crucial emptiness, I do not share.” Hornet made a rueful kind of sound. “Funny then, that such darkness gives me hope. Within it, I see the chance of change. A difficult journey you would face, but a choice it can create. Prolong our world's stasis or face the heart of its infection.”_

_It didn’t look away. Maybe not so surprising – when they “conversed,” Hornet was speaking to herself more than she was to the ghost, and her doubts and wishes were probably lost on it. But then she peered closer, and saw something odd. Its hands, which held a nail with such deft confidence, were trembling, minutely but fiercely, so that their outlines were blurred in a haze of vibration. She blinked and saw that its whole body was shaking so. It had been concealed by that new darkness. There must have been some growing pains accompanying that power._

_“I’d urge you to take the harder path,” she said, with finality. “But what end may come, the choice rests with you.”_

_With that, she directed her attention to the void beyond the platform’s edge. The ghost’s stare continued to burn into the bottom of her mask for a time, but eventually it pattered away and left her be._

_She wasn’t so hasty to leave. The Pale King’s atrocity was laid bare for all to see in this hole, and she wished to commit to memory. She stepped closer to the edge, peered down at those massed white shapes. Horns uneven, masks warped – the little ghost had actually been one of the more finely-formed, it appeared. Maybe that had something to do with its success. What she found more disturbing were the poses in which some of them had been frozen. These Void-infused husks, in their final extremity, had achieved a convincing imitation of life. Several were on their knees, heads bowed as if in despair, while others were clutching each other like they’d been trying to rouse their failed siblings. One quite close to the platform had ceased with its hand raised up, grasping, drowning. Those bent and delicate fingers._

_And what of the ones further below, she thought. Those who had never made the climb at all, or never had the chance, buried as they’d been underneath so many dry husks. Struggling to reach the King’s light even as they’d been gouged by the horns of the fallen, tearing through the petrified bodies for the sake of a climb that would never begin, might have already ended…_

_Hornet snapped out of her reverie and found that her hands were shaking. She massaged them back into stillness, irritated with herself. After all she’d seen and done, she should have been hardened enough not to show such weakness from a flight of imagination._

_Her hand paused mid-rub. A strangled gasp came from deep in her throat._

_Hornet turned and dashed out of the Abyss and back into the Forgotten Basin. Her time in that darkness had been brief but the Basin’s depleted light was enough to blind her, and she winced and looked about, straining through the bloom in her vision. When it returned completely, all she saw were some little footprints in the ground’s disturbed sediment, leading away. The ghost was long gone._

* * *

She opened her eyes to find herself seated before another firepit, this one a dismal cairn of pitted stones. The flame it housed was barely able to climb above its embers, reaching up like the hands of the drowned. To her right was the child, across was Grimm, all of them also sitting in the same position, legs crossed, heads bent. Grimm had shed all pomp and dignity; he looked exhausted, his cloak spread around him in ragged tatters. He gave her the merest glance before returning his attention to the fire.

“Welcome back,” he said.

The stone under her hand was glazed with grit. At the edges of the firelight was that hated wagon. Divine stood to its left, her face now wholly encased in that mourning mask, one palm resting atop each of the weevils’ bowed heads. Brumm stood to its right, his own hands empty, eyes raised up as if awaiting a meteor strike. They were unmoving, a mute tableau. Hornet could detect neither walls nor ceiling in this chamber – if indeed it was a chamber at all, and not exposed to the open air – but had a sense of enormous gravity somewhere high above, a pressure exerted from something beyond her perception. She felt crushed by it.

“Where are we?” she asked.

“Elsewhere.”

Memory crept back. She stiffened and reached beneath her cloak, felt the familiar contours of the horns and tools still bound there, and then pulled her needle off her back. Its once-brilliant sheen was wracked with tarnish, crazed with fracture. One good blow could shatter it now.

“Through Hallownest’s gates now dwells the population of loss,” Grimm said tonelessly. “All beneath its skin is forfeit to pernicious decay. You would not have survived much longer within its influence.”

“That’s why you saved me?”

“I did no such thing. This Troupe answers to a higher authority. One that is not over-burdened with compassion for your small and scurrying lives. Even if I had tried to convince it otherwise, my flame dwindles, and my voice grows weak.” A pause. “But another has petitioned in your favor.”

Her gaze was pulled to the child, who leaned so close to the fire that it nearly lapped their face. Neither they nor Grimm bothered to meet her eyes.

“I saw the King,” she said.

“Yes.”

“The Shaman said that his revival would bring disaster. But to this extent…” She rested her needle across her legs. “That wasn’t him that Rhea brought back, was it. It was something else. An Abyssal demon masquerading in his form.”

Grimm actually laughed at that, though it broke into a hacking cough that, Hornet would have sworn, expelled soot from his mouth.

“Faithless little godling,” he said. “I tell you now that what you saw was the Pale King, whole and true, and to deny it would be a terrible insult. The realm of death is unknown even to gods, and yet the black mourner found resonance with it, calling back whatever he had become from wherever he had ventured. Either a revival, or a reproduction so close as to make no difference. A genuine miracle.” He shook his head. “And the end to which that miracle had been realized makes it an exemplary folly in a world already rich with them. I ask you, of what use is an eternity of lonesome grieving? Grief is a _burden._ That is why it must be shared.”

Hornet paid no attention to his ruminations. By the time he’d started talking about miracles, she’d bent and started scratching her mask like she wanted to peel off this layer of pale chitin.

“So that was him,” she said bitterly. No point in contesting it; they were past falsehood now. “His much-vaunted positive qualities were greatly exaggerated. Rhea was insane, but to see what he did to her, could have done to me…but then, why wouldn’t he. That creature wouldn’t have had any idea who I was.”

“Oh, I rather doubt he even knew you were there. Either of you. He was occupied with other matters.”

Hornet looked up at that, her bitterness curdling to dread, because Grimm had once again taken on that little smirk. He’d been helpful, but from the very start she had gleaned a wicked twist of mischief in the Troupe Master’s personality, and it was on full display now.

“What do you mean?” she asked. In response, Grimm extended his hand to the flame, ran his fingers through it like he was stroking a lover’s hair. The fire curled and arched around his touch, hypnotic traceries of light.

“Such a broken genius the black mourner was,” he said. “She grasped the powers of place and memory to a degree that may be wholly unmatched in our time. The pathways that remembrance carves, how it sinks into what we cherish and where we’ve been. As she professed, memory is life itself, and by twisting it to serve the Pale King’s resurrection, he was not only returned from the dead, but imbued with the collective, silent mind of his very kingdom. In Hallownest, all is remembered. Every moment of his glorious reign…and every moment of what came after.”

The realization came slowly, but it did come, in her tightening chest and shaking hands. Before long she could no longer see Grimm’s eyes perched above the flame. Instead she saw the burial years, the promenade of poisoned light, the vistas of Hallownest gone to drenched and overgrown ruin. What she hadn’t witnessed personally, her imagination helpfully supplied. The gradual emptying of meeting-places and places of prayer and learning, the sobbing people shut behind barricaded doors against which the animate corpses of their loved ones battered and screamed, the waters of the Blue Lake closing up over the heads of bugs who walked in and did not walk out again, the desperate entreatment to the departed King growing ever quieter as the throats which spoke it were strangled and cut, all of this underscored with the drumbeat of the walking dead – and then at last, the darkness within the Black Egg, the sealed Vessel’s sacrifice giving way to an age of spasm, their shell straining and cracking against the fury of a usurped god that had drawn strength from a fragment of foolish kindness, a god that in time would even lend their captor a voice with which to pronounce their agony. All of these sights from which the Pale King had turned away, so that even his fabled precognition would no longer torture him, because you didn’t want to see the ones you cared for in pain, and he…

“He loved them all.” She spoke the words like they’d been dredged from her.

“And so he mourns them. A profound, annihilating grief.” Grimm teased a spiny tendril from the flame that knotted around his fingers – Hornet recognized its shape, the crown of its mouth, open in noiseless shriek. “Wyrm from grave-soil freshly risen. Entwined fully now with his domain, eyes and heart, mind and voice. But his eyes are forced open, his heart is breaking, his mind is clotted with death, and who knows how far his wails may carry, bellowed up from Hallownest’s throat?” He clenched his fist, and the shape collapsed into sparks. “I can see no flames past this one. No kingdoms. All is awash in pale light.”

The fire had continued to ebb as they talked. Hornet could feel the shadows licking at her back.

“An exquisite nightmare indeed,” said Grimm, without much pleasure. “Easy to see why this Troupe was called to behold it. You may remain here, if you wish, while the fire lasts. Though if you’d prefer not to linger, sleep will find you quickly in the outer dark.”

She looked back. There was nothing there. The sleep Grimm mentioned would no doubt be dreamless and unending. Her finger ran across her needle, its tip caught in those fresh cracks, but the unbroken surface was still lacquered smooth, just as it had been when she’d taken it on the way from Dirtmouth.

Dirtmouth.

“The villagers,” she said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“The hamlet on Hallownest’s surface.” She looked back at him intently. “You said that all beneath its skin was forfeit, but what about on top of it? Has it decayed like all the rest? Are the people there still alive?”

“My scarlet eyes glimpsed none of the mourner’s sigils there, but it no longer matters. Even if they flee, the light will soon overtake them.”

“Unless it’s snuffed out.”

Grimm’s face twisted in bemusement. But before that, just for an instant, Hornet could have sworn that he’d winked at her.

“The godling would become a godslayer now?” he said. “Taking up her broken weapon, in defense of the kingdom and the world beyond?”

Hornet laid her palms atop the needle. “I care nothing for the world. But those people are under my protection.”

The child stirred. They breathed in, and breathed out, and the flame wavered with that gesture. Grimm winced like something had just shouted in his ear, but it passed, and he looked to Hornet once more.

“Unlike some, there is little I find appealing about this predicament. Nightmares only gain their worth upon waking, after all.” He extended a talon to her. “The Pale King’s earthly form is now beyond anyone’s reach, but there are other pathways to access gods, as you yourself have seen. Even with the dream-goddess extinguished, all things are yet connected through the arteries of nightmare. That moth-forged artifact could open the way.”

She took out the Dream Nail. It reacted oddly to this alien space, that opaque shine to its surface brighter than ever, greasy to the touch.

“Be warned,” said Grimm. “To mount assault upon a god in the ethereal realm is the very peak of foolishness, and should you fail, then you will learn that there are far worse things than dying. I cannot even speculate on what you might encounter, or how you would overcome it.”

“That’s for the best. I couldn’t take much more of your prattle,” Hornet said. “Nevertheless, you and your Troupe have my thanks.”

Grimm laughed, exposing the full array of his slavering, sooty fangs – and as he did, the child brought their thumb to their mouth, bit down, and held it over the flame. The droplet of blood suspended from its tip was impossibly red. All other color was depleted around that speck.

“May our paths cross again someday,” he said. “You would dance so _marvelously.”_

The blood dripped down.

The flame at once roared up and out huge enough to devour the cairn entirely, its orange gone bloodred like the runnels of cloth dangling from the wagon’s sides. The heat was enormous but Hornet did not back away, _could_ not, seized in the same paralysis that had taken her before Rhea had begun her ritual. Under the crackle she could hear a sound that had always been there but had just now made itself known. The mammoth pulsation. The titanic throb. Brumm and Divine had angled their heads upward, to where that sound emanated, and behind them, in the expanded circle of firelight, Hornet glimpsed innumerable other shapes, formless white-masked oblongs bearing unlit torches, all of them raised as if in worship. Grimm barely invisible behind the stoked fire, grinning wide now, and when he spoke, the voice seemed to come not just from behind the fire but the fire itself, and in the pulse above:

_"Through the flame. Into the heart."_

Her hand moved unbidden. It took the Dream Nail and raised it up. Her Soul flooded through its hilt and the blade pierced the fire, pierced Grimm, and his chest caught alight as if the flame had been conveyed through the nail’s touch; as it spread, the darkness above her fell away, and in lockjawed horror she saw what hung above them all, a gargantuan twist of bloodslicked viscera whose beating spoke in an eldritch language all its own, and Grimm’s clothes were on fire and flames licked between his teeth and his face flaked away to expose that same meat that thumped in time with the heart above, and now Hornet too was on fire but she felt no pain even as the flame snaked up her arm and clutched her chest and forced her heart to also beat with that nightmare tempo, and with every fresh spasm came a sensation of being pulled along, forced from this liminal space through pathways that would be forever uncharted by anyone living or sane. The fire crept up to her eyes, and just before it erased her vision completely, the child turned to look at her.

“Goodnight,” they said.


	7. Chapter 7

White light kissed her awake. It leaked beneath her lids. She emerged quickly from dream-haze and startled to attention, body already braced against the imminent rot, but this light did not carry the decaying influence that had rendered Hallownest hollow. A lifeless emanation.

She was on a wide platform of wrought metal the color of ivory. It caught the light and reflected it so that it pierced her spinning head, forced her to shield her eyes. In so doing, she noticed and recalled the tatters of her cloak, and then confirmed the presence of the artifacts on her belt, the cartography of cracks on her needle. Only the Dream Nail was changed – its surface now runny like eggyolk, spirograph marred, rendered halfway to slag. She attempted to focus her Soul through it and it sparked once and fell dim.

When her eyes adjusted to the light, she saw its source. Past this massive veranda was a vast sprawl of a structure all fanglike spires, its surface gleaming with that same sheen and the light leaking from all its windows and eaves so that it became impossible to tell which sections of it emitted the light and which reflected it, so that it appeared forged from light itself. Here was the White Palace, which had vanished cleanly and suddenly as a pulled tooth not long after the Festerglow had once again begun to spill across the dreams and minds of Hallownest’s people, so that they spent their final days in frantic prayer, as if their wishes could weave the structure back into existence. The place to which she had always been beckoned, where she’d always refused to go.

She looked behind her and saw that the veranda dropped off into blank space, an expanse of misty nothing that went on forever. But past here, outside the aura of light, was something that struck her with vertigo and made her hastily step closer to solid ground. High above was a spiraling curvature of earth on which could be dimly viewed sights that she would have considered unthinkable if she hadn’t ventured through them all her life. Patches of thorned greenery, crags of rock and purple-smeared peaks, the pollinated haze of heaving fungus and speckles of blue water – Hallownest, turned inside-out and wrung thin and helixed through this nothingness, its scenery repeated and merged into senseless mash. The same could be seen in either direction, this palace just a speck on the winding entrail of the former kingdom. There was no sound, not a breath of wind, and no movement besides the curls of ethereal fog.

The White Palace’s entryway had no gates. It hung open like a rotted jaw. Through it spilled more of that searing white light.

She went in.

Her footsteps echoed on white marble. The foyer’s seamless white floor gave way to white stairs with wrought white rails and the doors were white and the handles were white and the trimmings on all were also white, and on the white walls hung white tapestries, no design or insignia among the white. She walked up the stairs and the white-on-white surroundings gave her no impression of ascent. She maneuvered by gleam, by the hardening of shapes among whiteness.

She passed through a white drawing-room where white chairs rested on white carpets thick as bleached mold, and white paintings hung in white frames over a great white grandfather clock that lacked both tick and numeral, the face solid white and the interior white so it stood as a timeless white pillar against the white walls; a white dining hall where vast white tables stood in ranks sufficient to seat one hundred or more, and white dishes were flanked by white cutlery and clustered around white vases holding white orchids with white stems suspended in liquid made white by the surrounding whiteness; a white kitchen and white pantry whose tools and utensils were white and sat like protrusions from the white countertops, where the knives’ white handles curved the same as their white blades, and the white stovepits were crusted with a cake of white ashes, and the larder held only white light within; a white solar where the white armchairs were unyielding as the white stone walls and the white table had never held a meal and the white fireplace with its white logs behind white grates had never been lit and would only burn with a cold white flame; white bedchambers whose voluminous white-sheeted mattresses brooded beneath white canopies and the white armoires held only shapeless runnels of white fabric, and the white-trimmed mirrors upon white vanities reflected only planes of white so the glass appeared a solid plane of white as well; white gardens, white-ceilinged, so that the white plants appeared nourished only on this ambient whiteness and all the leaves and petals of any size and configuration had the feeling of old shed skin to the touch, and a senseless white sundial cast no shadow and was ringed by no numerals; a white library where the ranks of white shelves bore up books white-spined and white-covered whose white pages were not blank but written in white, white letters on white, their messages imparted only in paroxysms of migraine; a white chapel that lacked pulpit or idols or iconography besides the stained glass stained white and the ranks of white-waxed candles whose white wicks wisped white, as if the chapel was devoted not to any deity but to the white itself; a white gallery, that is a gallery of white, to the meaning and form of white, white canvases and white sculptures that when viewed from any angle gained no further definition or shadow beyond a spiral or scrawl of white and were kept caged by white posts and white ropes that did themselves become tributes to the white as with the doors leading out from this white and to new white that was the same white, all of it in unbroken continuum so that there no longer appeared to have ever been anything before or after this seized space, never any other moment or sight or sensation past the white, the color of purity, of divinity, of blankness, of loneliness, eternal, immanent, immense, unfulfilled, forlorn, fleeting, fading, gone.

She walked and listened to herself walking. There was no time here, nor breeze, nor scent, only the white, and the effects it had on her mind were peculiar. For example: a gradual impression of moving without movement, only the metronomic click of her footsteps or the minute ache in her legs to indicate that she was earthed and not drifting aimless through white space; a sense of visual incongruity, quickly ignored, that these white walls were not in fact solid white but bore an inconceivable craze of barely-seen seams that took familiar shapes, a hundred thousand million jigsawed horned bodies joined brokenlimbed and cracknecked to make up these seemingly smooth surfaces; a feeling of coming untethered from herself, no longer in her body but drifting just behind it, so that _I watched myself walking through this unending sterile architecture as if_ her body had gone to a place where no thought could reach, encaged as it was now within the thoughts of someone else, _the King’s nightmare, as the Troupe-Master had told me, though I hadn’t allowed myself to consider what that meant_ , and if she had then perhaps _I would not have come here. Of course I would have come here. There was never another option before me._

She was in the workshop, with _no recollection of my arrival. I opened no doors._ Washed all white, the stains and shades upon the strange contrivances with which the King had tinkered here now rendered even less comprehensible in their anonymity. Here was the place where he had shaped Void into his thralls, _the same as he had done to those children, they were children, they were never_ vessels bent to his will, and the polished sarcophagi that had molded them were vacant and bleached. Towards the end, she thought, he had spent more and more time here, turning his tools over in his hands like talismans. His wife gone, his retainers’ sycophancy meaningless noise, his foresight an augur behind his eyes. All his fabulous powers of invention twisted to abominable acts, and the gifts of mind that he’d gained and bestowed serving only to torture him further.

_I did not think that. I know nothing of this place._

How similar to her own life, she thought. _I didn’t._ Entombing herself within the dead lands she had never claimed as her own, silencing her inner desolation with the strangling thread of duty. _These are not my words._ She had thought the company of other lives to be at once beyond and beneath her. Until that desecrating Void-born witch had tunneled through her memories, she had buried most everything, even the thoughts of her mother, the one person she’d allowed to become close. _I swear that this is not me._ Love was now a thing unrecognizable. That was why, in the final days, she had not taken hold of it when it had shown itself to her, not understood its true shape until it had been far beyond her grasp. _Where are my hands. I would deafen myself to these lies if I could only find my hands._ That was why she had thrown herself so willingly at this impossible task, one more thread to which she could cling, because love destroys us and yet without love we are left with no other choice than to make ourselves the instruments of our own destruction. _No more. Please._ She would never return from here, from this palace that was not a palace, and even if she did, then the thing that would return would be no different from the tormented and woeful figure she had witnessed earlier, just before it had commenced the obliteration of all it had cared for with a grief so consuming that it would not even allow its bearer the focus to die. Sealed within this mourning, to live forever.

_Who were you?_

There was no answer.

* * *

Now even the palace’s most limited features had fallen away. She wandered in stupor and let the architecture push her like a tide. She had vague recollections of an empty throne with a limitless space behind, the white stretching out until the walls and ceiling became the world, and she had walked past the throne and into the white and had continued walking. She knew that if she turned around now she would see nothing, the vestige of the throne subsumed by white, and here there were no more doors or directions to guide her. The palace’s weak pretensions to form had all fallen away. All that remained was this endless muffling sterility, dimensions kept deliberately vacant, perpetually unfulfilled. An unheard word. A dream for want for wish for maybe.

Then she saw a speck. So faint and flitting that it disappeared when she blinked, an errant glitch in her vision. She stopped walking (the sudden noiselessness crashing in on her) and waited for it to return, and it did. In the white expanse, the merest contrast.

It was the only sight there was. She kept to it like a compass’ bearing, and continued her approach no matter how stubbornly it stayed pinned to the furthest point of this white-on-white horizon. When it finally began to grow larger she had the sense that it did so only on its own sufferance, that the speck itself had allowed the distance between them to finally close. It darkened. It split. She walked until its shape fully resolved, and went further, and then stopped, so that there were perhaps twenty paces between her and this kernel nestled within the dream-palace’s core.

The Pale King knelt there, head slightly bowed. The slit eyeholes of his mask were visible, and after passing through all the unyielding white that cocooned him, she had the feeling of falling just to see that dark, like it generated its own gravity. In his arms were two further shapes clutched to his chest. She recognized one. The other was similar in appearance, and though she had not seen it before, she knew the notch-pattern on those horns, had first witnessed them stained with poisonous light. Why would he hold them both, she thought briefly, and then understood – the vast and grieving mind with which he had been imbued must have also carried memories of the ghost on its tide. He had watched their travails. Their sacrifice.

He raised his head, and those eyes met hers for the first time.

He looked at her like she was a wayward piece of furniture. And why not. They had mutually decided to remain strangers to one another, and she likewise felt nothing upon seeing him in full without that haze of rotting light, no matter how she searched. The Pale King’s form was slight but it held potency to match the Radiance at her peak, and she had no way of knowing the means through which he could defend himself. If only some point of commonality could be found, this final gap breached, to divert this disastrous course. But in the end, the truant-princess of Hallownest knew of only one way to pursue her duty.

She unslung her needle, and it swished through the air as she leveled it at the King. He rose, carefully but without delay, as if he had been awaiting the gesture, and as he did the two figures he’d held fell limp to the floor. She felt a welcome surge of loathing for him then, to this pitying wretch who’d so easily cast aside his children once again, but then she noticed how their shapes were malformed, already crumbling. He hadn’t thrown them away; they had slipped through his hands, falling apart to ash. He extended his palms to her so that she could see the pale flakes trickle through his fingers, and as they did, more ash fell from above in a thickening soundless snow. She didn’t dare lower her weapon or look away but in her mind’s eye she envisioned the unseen encasement of this place flaking away like the divine corpse’s molt, and the ash from the King’s hands wouldn’t stop falling, and the ash from all around piled heavy on her shoulders.

There came a hurricane gale whose shriek carried a grisly _living_ undernote, a voice warped to the borderland of mindless noise, and she cried out in response and held her arms before her face and tried to brace herself, but the wind didn’t blow her away because it blew in all directions, buffeting her from every side with force enough to turn the ashfall into stinging whipcracks with that twisted unbroken howl shaking her down to the seams. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see, and when it finally slowed and she lowered her arms, she was dumbstruck by what lay around her.

The King was gone. So were the children, and the room, and the palace itself. The metal veranda on which she’d first awoken now connected to a platform of blank white polished to mirror brightness, that was no larger than, say, a fountain square. She looked around, dazed from the sudden stimulus of even this foggy landscape after the featureless world she’d just traversed, then heard something else. A groan like the opening of a long-shut door. The ground lurched beneath her feet and she looked up and the realization of what she saw there would have left her screaming in terror if the fear hadn’t first wired her jaw shut.

The spiral of Hallownest above uncoiled. Its mutated landscape grinded against itself and rained chunks of stone and flora into the infinite. The ground where she stood was also moving because it was connected, they were all connected on this sinuous planetoid bearing the twisted mockery of the eternal kingdom, and the movement of what lay beneath that crust was smoothly organic, because she now understood what this place truly was, even before she looked to the distance and glimpsed the gnashing, raving crown of fangs at its head. Hallownest, born of the Wyrm.

_Borne by the Wyrm._

She tried to embed herself in the platform but it rebuffed her needle’s point. She attempted to find purchase with her silk but it all slid away. And the world tilted, it rejected her, and she was cast flailing into the dream-void with her cries swallowed by the wind rushing about her ears; she fought to right herself and as the lashing tendril of the Wyrm’s tail passed underneath she threw her needle with all her strength and it made contact with a cliff of purple-smeared stone and her thread snapped taut, reeled her in. She clung to that wall like rainwater to a windowpane and to her further horror watched the cracks begin to form in the crystals beside her face. Nothing here was stable. All had begun to decay.

The land was a kaleidoscope of mongrel wonders, brambles soaked in acid spotting lakewater speckled with windowglass frosted with fungus choked with cobweb, all of it tilt-a whirl as the Wyrm writhed and spun. She had no sense of orientation, she traveled solely by the feel of the wind whipping her face, always pressing forward into that gale. She leapt from the cliff and onto a patch of reeking fungus and from there skittered across a puddle offspring of the Blue Lake scraping space with the sepia stone of Kingdom’s Edge with the maw of the Colosseum rising from the skin of the nearby space like a tunneling parasite, and clambered across bramble insensate to the pain of the thorns digging into her hands and from there skittered into the gloomy tunnels of the Crossroads as they heaved and collapsed behind her, and she had no idea of how much further there was to go, what awaited her at the end, but whatever remained of her honed instincts frantically beat back at the speculations of her cursed mind and carried her along.

**"LIVE FOREVER."**

She was midway through pulling herself along on another spool of thread when the voice rang out, and she lost her grip and barely regained it before she could tumble into a pool of acid hungrily swallowing up flurries of sourceless molt; the voice was barely a voice at all but an agglomeration of cacophony, words tortured into being through writhing plants and frothing liquids and a cyclopean grinding of stone, and even bereft of personality as it was, it held a core of deranged desperation that made her own mind feel like somewhere it too had begun leaking. The world again began to spin and her needle flashed and sang, the cracks along it growing with every impact.

**"LIVE FOREVER."**

Hallownest itself bellowed its refrain. She collided with a whirling hunk of crystal and ricocheted from there into a pool of water that remained moored to the cavity which contained it even as it flipped end-over-end; when she burst gasping from its surface the droplets fell horizontal from her face and she waited to spear a bent and mammoth toadstool and pull herself free. Steel spires encased in fog. Gravemounds slathered in stagnant honey. She could not do this. She could not do this.

**"LIVE FOREVER."**

How to strike at something that would scarcely consider you a bacterium. How to speak over that destroying voice. It resounded ceaselessly, a lamentation and a command and a curse. Behind her the land was an inchoate maelstrom of degenerate matter that swirled around the Wyrm’s shell in buzzsaw rotation, and the breaching leviathans of its fangs were still so far. Even if she made it, all it would mean was that there was nowhere left to run. She leapt from purchase to purchase and dashed across constructions of silk that snapped while her feet were still upon them, and then reared back and hurled her needle to another bubbling patch of fungus that had encrusted a broken heap of Deepnest stone – and then another one of the Crystal Peak’s gems was flung free, and intercepted her needle in mid-flight, and the weapon struck that unyielding surface and shattered.

Her momentary shock was all it took for another flying chunk of stone to crack her just above the eye. The world bloomed bright and she lashed out with the furor of the drowning, spreading her silk wherever it might take hold, and through the thumping haze of her concussion she saw a displaced spires from the City of Tears approaching; she hooked to one of its balconies and pulled and then crashed through a window and came to a rolling tangle-limbed halt on an apartment interior. The place was scraped clean of habitation, like a rough-hewn simulacrum of the home it had been based on – there was no furniture, no mementos, and the hanging slamming doors of the cabinets showed nothing within. But there was solid ground here, and she braced herself against a countertop and staggered upright. There was wetness oozing through her mask and she gingerly reached above her eye, felt the crack running through it.

Her thoughts had time to catch up with her. The numbing deprivation of the White Palace had given way to this animal impulse, the Wyrm blindly chewing its way through the luminiferous ether. She lifted the ragged remains of her cloak and saw the horns and nails still there, the thread that bound them holding up through her flight, but it meant little. There was no slaying this even with a pure nail at her side. The windows shook with the Wyrm’s voice and would soon crack with the destruction wrought by its frenzied throes. She would either join that rubble or be flung off into the fog, and what would become of her then? Whatever it may be, she had a grim certainty that there would be no release from it. This was not a realm to which death came easily.

The room tumbled, walls and floor briefly switching places before it righted itself again. She barely had the energy to keep upright throughout it. Her exhaustion here might be no more than a dream itself, but it was a convincing one.

She refused to contemplate the world outside, the ruinous light that had no doubt gutted her home and would spill over the villagers and further, flooding untold distances. She forced herself to consider the Pale King with a hunter’s clarity. Always so seemingly untouchable, seamless as his idols; his weakness was love, and here that served to fuel his terrible vitality. Now it was his strengths only which protected him – the King’s distance and mind, the Wyrm’s size and shell. In the dual life he’d lived, the only time he may have ever showed true vulnerability was when he’d passed through his first self-imposed death, emerging from the black egg lodged in his old self’s throat.

Hornet’s fingers scraped the countertop.

She pushed herself away and shambled through what remained of the building, slamming into the walls with its every jolt and shudder. She followed the wind through the growing fissures in the walls until it struck her face directly and then found another window, through which the Wyrm’s head could be glimpsed. The landscape around its head was just as warped as what had become of it further back, a lethal collar of whirring geography through which only the barest details of its old territories could be glimpsed – a flash of purple crystal, a fencepost festooned with bramble.

Hornet looked to her hands, spread her fingers; from their tips spun fresh patterns of intertwined thread. She clasped them in wordless prayer.

Then she leapt out, into the raging storm.

In all the Weavers’ storied history of soul-spinning there had never been an attempt like this, not even in legends, which were told only to grant the listener an idea of the impossible. No more needle to offer handholds. Her thread splayed in all directions, tied now to all limbs as it was snatched by the storm’s seizure. At the minutest vibration of one she would sever it and pull along by the others, silk tying itself to whatever fragments of broken architecture it could find, pulling, lashing, seeking, and a spray of displaced acid struck her and destroyed her cloak further though she felt its sizzle not, and the storm’s shriek erased all but the most insensate and gibbering instinct from her mind, and the world shattered into a haze of razor-edged color and if the Wyrm’s body made the merest ripple or turn then she would surely lose her bearing and be thrown into oblivion, but she was still going with limbs that had passed pain and numbness and become gossamer extensions of the thread they bore, those teeth growing closer, each blown out to the size of the Crystal Peak itself, a maw enough to swallow all the world…

…and a sheet of metal smashed into paper thinness whirled by with a shining scraping, and passed through her, and there was a brilliant flash of pain in her arm just above the elbow and the arm was gone. The threads snapped. She became unbalanced. A fusillade of rubble cracked her rapid-fire and carried her away, over the edge, into nothingness. With the desperate unlogic of dreams she grabbed at her belt with her remaining arm and took the horns and bore them aloft like torches, and screamed in a voice high enough to flense her throat bloody:

_“TAKE THEM!”_

The Wyrm made no response and she felt all hope leave her. Its shape pulled out, to be erased by the unending mists. But then it turned and with the deceptive and unstoppable speed of orbiting stars it descended on her, moving so much faster than she could ever fall, and its fangs spread and the titanic blackness of its mouth blossomed and she was swallowed whole.

Here now was agony’s heart. Here was a core of atrocity that defied comprehension. She fell through a blackness that consumed all senses, nothing to see or smell or touch and the only sound a slavering chthonic undulation that carried knives within its harmonic, ripping her apart in strips, and she was losing even the perception of her own broken body and it was only a matter of moments before all that remained of her was this pain, an eternity of devouring. She flailed out with a hand that no longer felt like a hand and spoke without knowing if she still had voice, casting the words out into the starving dark.

_Show yourself. Reach out to me. Give me your hand, give me your mind, but if there was anything that we have ever held in common then it must be grasped now while there is still enough of us to want it. Please let us close this distance. I want to know who you are. Show me who you—_

She stopped falling.

There was still nothing to see except impenetrable black, but she now she had the sensation of solidity beneath her, and that evil noise had ceased. Her ears still rang and her body was still numbed by it, so it took a moment before she found that she was not alone down here. A shape gripped her.

The shape was perhaps slightly larger than herself, and its hands felt like her hands, and it was slightly sticky to the touch. Its embrace was not comforting or gentle; it clutched her like a piece of driftwood in a torrential current, and its sobs heaved its body in spasm, gulping air only to scream it back out again in high serrated notes. Its voice was warped to noise. Half-formed words bobbed like flotsam to the sobs’ surface before they were swallowed up again. Its wails were like those of newborns but already freighted with a lifetime of misery, and they heightened to agonized screams and ebbed back to weeping, a beating, grieving tide.

She draped her remaining arm around it. It seemed the only thing that could be done. There was no change in it from her touch; it continued to seize and shudder, its unseen fingers scrabbling at her shell. That sound was the only one here. And it resonated with something in her, dredged up the memories which lay beneath the ones already churned. The stretches of empty space during the dead years, all the loneliness she’d forced herself to swallow. The early days when she would imagine her mother’s shadow in the shadow of foreign scenery. The itching on her neck as she no longer felt the Weavers’ hopeful, encouraging stares. Digging her hands through her cloak with eyes shut so that she could pretend these fingers were those of the caretaker she could no longer bring herself to visit. The growing certainty that, although she yet breathed, she had rendered herself permanently divorced from the living world, that this quiet sadness that skulked inside her like a dark iron ball would last forever. And finally, the very last long night in the black temple where she’d awoke surrounded by the detritus of the only remaining creatures with whom she could have shared any sort of kinship, too late to understand that bond in herself, always too late, still growing later, and the future now rolling out before her like an endless crypt.

Her throat tightened, her breath turning to hiccups. She would have fallen to her knees if this sobbing shape wasn’t holding her upright. And when her own wails commenced she still couldn’t hear them, merging as they did with the others, unable to tell where one voice began or another ended. Her home was gutted and her family neglected to dust and she had persisted for so many stagnant years while forcing herself to never truly live and she cried for all of it, for that which was lost and could never be recovered, as if all Hallownest’s dead could find release from within her throat.

There was no time here. Epochs could have passed between them. But at the end of it, the shape’s cries ebbed further than before, and its hands blindly passed over Hornet’s body as if just now realizing her presence here. They cradled the sides of her mask, tenderly. She responded in kind, running her own palm along the side of its head, the contours she had always seen but never become close enough to touch.

Everything was still. Then the hands receded, and their owner stepped away. Hornet reached to the nail at her back and the darkness trembled at the sound of its unsheathing.

Her father breathed in, breathed out. Waiting for her.

“Thank you,” she said, and drove the nail into his heart.

* * *

_Within the Temple of the Black Egg, the sounds of combat echoed._

_Hornet had been frank with the little ghost when the two of them had met at the temple entrance. That chamber was filled close to bursting with the infection’s miasma and riddled with so many spells of binding that someone like her, without the Void’s sinister protection, would not last long in its depths. She had promised to assist the ghost if the opportunity arose, and that promise had fallen into the lusterless black holes of its eyes and disappeared. It was no longer shivering as it had at the edge of the Abyss. She had managed to convince herself that it had been the Void’s power settling, or her own overreaction, or a trick of the light._

_The ghost had held its gaze for what she thought to be an unusually long time after she’d fallen silent, but then its head had lowered and it had walked past her and into the temple, its pace unhurried. Not long after, the temple’s mouth had emitted a deafening wrathful screech of such potency that it had practically shoved her across the room, and everything after that was a din of clanging metal. She had waited at the threshold, needle in her hands, every nerve singing with anticipation. For some reason it had become very important to her that she aid in this fight. Perhaps she wanted to contribute to this errand in a capacity more significant than a brief roadblock on the ghost’s own path._

_Then, another scream, but this one’s harmonic was subtly different in a way that somehow wrenched at her – there was defiance in it, a different color of rage than the ones that had been heard up to this point. It was followed by a series of meaty rips and a liquid gush, and then steel once again began to meet steel, but the rhythm of that clash had faltered. One of the combatants was weakening fast. It was time._

_She took off running into the temple’s inner sanctum, and just as she had thought, the cloying reek of the infected air made her head spin and the runes imprinted on the walls burned blurring patterns somewhere deep behind her eyes. But she saw well enough to make out the ghost in the distance, facing down a towering misbegotten creature with a cracked crescent of a mask, its greatnail raised high, and she spun her needle about and javelined it toward the tainted Vessel. It struck true, piercing between the Vessel’s eyes, and she reeled herself in, gripped the needle, wrenched it, lashed her thread around the thrashing abomination's limbs and screamed for the ghost to finish it – because whatever its choice, prolongment or banishment, it had to be made now._

_The sea of orange light roiling in the Vessel’s eyes_ surged _as if it sought to burst free from that mask entirely and the walls caught its shrieks and shouted them back in a harridan’s chorus. The little ghost did not look at her as it sheathed its nail and drew the same exotic hilt that it had used to slay her mother, and the blade’s electric arc flared, and it swung, and then they were all bathed in a corona of soft gold light._

_Utter silence._

_When the nail-blade had made contact, the Vessel’s screams had stopped with the suddenness of a doused candle. Again there was that moment of stillness like an indrawn breath, the ghost standing with its nail still at attention, the Vessel frozen within Hornet’s bindings. Her own mind was strangely clear, open like the lid of an empty chest, and she saw the light in the Vessel’s eyes abate the merest fraction. She realized how similar its shape was to hers, that mask notched and broken but the same smooth arc, and she felt pulses of emotion so elemental that they had no words or memories to tether them, just raw feeling that burst inside her like signal-flares. Recognition. Gratitude. Relief._

_None of these emotions had been her own. They were conveyed to her, as though transmitted upon the lines of her silk. Her concentration broke in surprise, and the bindings loosened, and the Vessel’s greatnail slipped from its fingers and clanged to the ground. It reached to her with a trembling hand._

_Then the light in its eyes winked out entirely, was subsumed by liquid black, and that blackness boiled and leaked and then burst out in a soundless nova that flung her, needle and all, away from the Vessel and into unconsciousness._

_When she awoke, it briefly made no difference whether her eyes were open or shut, dark as the chamber had become. Then the shadows receded, actually_ dripped _down the walls and lamps in runnels that evaporated into scentless smoke on contact with the ground. She was in a deep crater where the ground was fissured like a smashed plate, and she rose, wincing as her joints protested, looked about, and stopped. The little ghost’s mask was not far, cracked in two, more of that liquid dark running away from it and into the cracks. Scattered about were the treasures it had carried – the nails, the charms, the map stained and sticky with tarry fluid. The abandoned chains overhead clinked._

_She picked up her needle – the slight scrape it made against the ground echoed in this chamber like a shouted curse – and slung it to her back. She climbed out from the hole and saw the Vessel there at its periphery, having apparently been flung clear of the crater by whatever eruption of dark had affected the chamber this way. She stepped over its greatnail, so aged and cracked that it would now better serve as a bludgeon, and approached the body. Its one arm was splayed out, the eyeholes of its mask empty. She shook it and found it lightweight as a bundle of dry leaves. She shook it again, harder, and when it did not awaken she turned back to the crater._

_Her mind was still sludgy. It left her body to continue to its own devices, its slow pace and dismal orbit. She walked from one end of the crater and back again. She picked up a charm and turned it over in her fingers and then let it fall. She tried to open the map and found it glued shut by that liquid. She would have to fix that later. Not right to leave it here. It could be of use to someone._

_The work was done, she thought, still halfway in a dream. But what of all these things. Not right to leave them here. Not proper, not fair. After all they’d done. To just leave them in the dark. She had to take responsibility, as the last Hallownest royal. She was the last._

_She took the map and the nails. She unsheathed the pure nail and watched its edge glint. Couldn’t carry them all out. The little ghost, maybe, or what was left of it (what had happened to the rest of it, where had it gone, that soft shell already fled to darkness), but the Vessel, the other, just too cumbersome, even it was light, a child’s lightness. But something of them should persist. Be remembered._

_Her thoughts’ own orbits decayed, and they would fail shortly after she left the temple, casting her down into a far deeper sleep from which she would not emerge for a full day and night. But for now, the last coherent and misfiring part of her mind contemplated whether this fine, sharp nail could cleanly cut chitin._

_Hornet bent over her siblings’ horns, and found that it could._

* * *

Again she emerged from the quickmud of unconsciousness, and for a minute or so was fortunate enough to remain in that hazy in-between state where thought and memory still hadn’t solidified, not caring or understanding what she’d dreamed or where she was. Then the fingers of her missing hand twitched, and she jolted awake all at once; she sat up and a monstrous ripping pain went through her head and almost knocked her flat again. She held up her hands – both hands, there and whole – and ran them across her uncracked mask. Her shell was unmarked by acid, her relics all in place, and even her cloak was no worse for wear than it had been before entering the dream. What she’d suffered there had apparently been limited to that realm.

She was so busy accounting for her various pains that it still took her a little while longer to see where she was. Then she looked around, and her hands limply fell back to her sides.

She was on a plane of flat sheared stone, slightly tilted, not much larger than the huts in Dirtmouth. Not far from where she’d lain was her needle, unbroken but still crazed with cracks. And beyond that, endless water.

The Blue Lake and the city on which had rained were now one. The towers had toppled and many leaned half-in and half-out of the murky water like the ribs of fallen colossi, and the water was further choked with rubble, bodies, baubles, furniture. There were no obstructions to her vision, nothing to prevent her from seeing clear to the other end of the cavern except for the vastness of the cavern itself – the towers’ shapes stretched out seemingly forever, growing blurred before they joined the black. When she looked up, she could see the hard chips of stars, turning languorously on their axis.

She focused on smaller questions, to distract from the enormity of this devastation. How she’d come to be here, for one thing. She had been nowhere near this place when Rhea’s disastrous ritual had been completed. When she bent to grab her needle, she saw something else on this heap of rock that helped her to understand – a smaller pile of stones, a makeshift firepit, its inner edges bearing the marks of char. A parting gesture from a certain traveling circus, perhaps.

There was something else beside that cairn. A pile of shards gleaming like mica. She approached it, and her breath caught in her throat.

The mask had been considerably more damaged than the little ghost's – it hadn’t cracked in two but broken like a smashed mirror, and some pieces looked to be missing entirely. But several of its many horns were still intact, and if she pushed the shards this way and that, then the gentle oblong of an eyehole may have formed, looking out at her blindly. She stood over those remains, listened to the distant splashes as further pieces of refuse fell into the flooded ruins.

Hornet could have cried again, if she’d wanted to. This place would have drunk away the sound as surely as the Abyssal Sea, and there was no one around to hear, no matter how long and loud she wailed. But she kept quiet, and bundled the pieces of her father’s mask in her arms and carried them to the rock’s edge. She sat down with her heels over the water and the broken mask in her lap, and stayed there for a long while, rocking slowly back and forth, until the rosy light of dawn crept over the gouged hole in Hallownest’s skin and spilled over what was left of its capital – the sorrowful, beautiful, and eternal City of Tears.


	8. Chapter 8

The blasted plains which lay beyond the kingdom’s borders were stricken by a constant gale, always blowing in the same direction; for the rare traveler venturing to that place, it had served as guidepost and lethal invitation in one. The Howling Cliffs were so named because of that wind, which passed between the dried shells clustering its walls, through the tunnels marked by old firepits and the nails of those who had perished with the kingdom so close at hand. This wind hadn’t ceased. It came from outside, and despite what the legends said, Hallownest had no claim to it.

The mourning light had touched this land too, but only briefly, enough to render several footpaths more treacherous than ever and stud the ground with fallen stalactites. Lumaflies lay in clusters like handfuls of snow, and while a few of the tiktiks and vengeflies still lived at the furthest reaches, their movements were sluggish and erratic and they would not last long. These creatures were heedless to a small cave just at the midpoint of King’s Pass, where firelight flickered within.

The fire was small, its fuel consisting mainly of debris that had been dragged from the ruins of Dirtmouth, but it still gave enough light to read by. Hornet bent over the map laid in front of her. It was far vaguer than the ones she was accustomed to, certainly moreso than the one the little ghost had carried – rough sketches were made to represent landmarks or changing terrain, but the distances between them were hard to grasp no matter how long she stared. Hallownest was in the lower-right corner of the parchment, represented, as ever, by the four-pronged sigil of the Pale King. She placed a finger on it, traced it west.

“Is it clear enough?” Cornifer asked. His glasses glinted in the firelight.

“I’ve seldom seen maps which extend beyond the kingdom. This is…larger.”

“Mm, quite so. And it’s not my best work, unfortunately. Pharloom is frustratingly elusive despite its reputation. This was mainly put together from my other recollections about the area.”

“It’s fine. Certainly better than anything I could have come up with.”

“Yes, well, a map that can’t be understood by its reader is no better than bare parchment. Allow me?” Hornet obligingly scootched aside and let Cornifer settle in front of the map. “These wastelands may seem endless, but they _do_ give way to less hostile terrain, and one advantage of Pharloom attracting so many pilgrims is that its roads are well-trod…or were, anyway, enough so that the footprints haven’t yet wholly faded. Most paths out through the Howling Cliffs converge at the dunes’ edge. Once you get that far, wait for daylight and head north. Look for the Dancers, you see here, that spire, it resembles a pair of colossal bugs embracing, may actually _be_ so, though the weathering has made it impossible to tell. Head west from there and you’ll come to grassland – be wary of storms, they’re vicious in this region – and eventually hills, here.” His finger traced to a series of jagged ridges. “There are some oddly varied accounts of where the path to Pharloom lies, but one travelogue I found said that a route could be found ‘beneath the prayers of mountains.’ This area is home to Vanderlyle’s Peak, a tall cliff that, in the dusk, supposedly resembles a pair of clasped hands. It’s worth investigating, I’d say.”

“I see.”

“Of course, if you’re looking for a diversion, then the Cauldron of Saints is not far from there.” Cornifer’s finger continued to move, his voice growing faraway. “A lake brimming with nacreous water, quite undrinkable, of course, but it reflects the sun in the most scintillating way. Rumor has it that it was the result of an endeavor to seal a sudden surfacing of the Abyssal Sea in ages past, which may explain the Tarwood several days’ travel to the northeast, a patch of forest whose flora has all gone pitch-black. I’m no botanist but I’ve heard it said that the roots somehow tapped the Void itself, which may have been diverted by the Cauldron. Maps of _that_ place would sell for a small fortune, I’m sure, but it’s terribly treacherous, especially after dark, and I fare poorly in the…er…” He finally noticed Hornet staring at him, and awkwardly coughed. “Apologies. Iselda usually gives me a poke when I get caught up in myself like that.”

“I don’t mind.” She looked back to the map. “The world is vast, isn’t it?”

“It is,” said Cornifer. “Would that I could see it all.”

The Elderbug dozed further back in the cave. Jiji was nearer the mouth, and may or may not have been asleep – she sat so still that it was difficult to tell. Cornifer looked to both of them, polished his glasses, put them back on. Hornet could sense him creeping up on the next topic of conversation, as if trying to catch it unawares.

“Iselda and the brothers should be back shortly,” he said.

“Yes.”

“She’s going to try and talk you into coming along. Again. Rather fervently.”

“I assumed.”

“But you’re set on your present course?”

Hornet ran her palms along the map as though the wrinkles in its surface would provide answers.

Exhausted though she’d been, extricating herself from the ruins of Hallownest had been a simple matter after her traversal of the nightmare Wyrm. The cavern’s edges had yet held, and she’d bounded across the wrecked buildings until she’d been able to find a patch of stone sturdy enough to hold her decayed needle. From there it had been a straightforward, if painstaking, matter of ascending up that curved slope to the edge of the hole that had opened up in the earth’s surface. She had dangled so high over the city that a single missed throw or weakened grip would have spelled disaster, and towards the end had been forced to swing across rock that collapsed like dry biscuits with the least weight, but she had made it in the end.

Meanwhile, Sly and the Dirtmouth refugees had just exited the far end of King’s Pass when Jiji had told them that the calamitous grief staining the land behind them had suddenly ceased. Sly had been unconvinced, even though Jiji’s health had improved markedly – she’d been barely coherent up until that point, her eldritch senses wracking her with migraine – but Iselda insisted they turn back, for Hornet’s sake. Sly had still demurred, and so Iselda had snatched him up by the throat (“Impressive turn of speed, that woman,” he’d later remark mildly) and forced the issue. A compromise had been reached. They would make camp where they were, and wait for dawn. And that was why Hornet had clawed her way from the edge of the great pit and barely had time to take in the ruination around her before she’d been swept up in Iselda’s arms.

It had taken the rest of the morning for her to tell them what had transpired at Kingdom’s Edge, and her voice had wandered and stammered, but at the end of it, everyone had agreed to put off their journey for another day, to give her time to recover. Hornet hadn’t bothered to argue. Oro and Mato had been a touch over-zealous when gathering supplies from Sly’s stash, and this gave them an opportunity to use some of the excess. They’d given her food, mended her cloak, and forced her practically at nail-point to keep to her bedroll and not wander too much.

Then she’d told them of her own intentions. The same path she’d decided upon in Deepnest, just before her first encounter with Rhea – to find Pharloom, and what remained of her kin. And she’d asked to travel alone. Sly and Iselda hadn’t pressed the matter, though Iselda had given the impression that she wasn’t about to let it go, even as she’d provided Hornet with her personal logbook of edible flora and fauna in the surrounding lands. Her husband, meanwhile, had quietly and busily set about his own preparations, outfitting her with supplies, navigation tools, and this map, assembled from whatever he knew of Pharloom and the territories in which it supposedly lay.

And this map, while useful, was not forthcoming with advice on how to best answer Cornifer’s question. Hornet’s gaze remained fixed on it until Cornifer coughed awkwardly.

“I don’t need to hear your reasons,” he said. “Just be prepared.”

“Noted. What are they doing out there, anyway?”

“Conferring with Sly. We plan to leave at daybreak. Not that sunlight is all that distinguishable in the wastes, but the predatory bugs are less active then, and we have two vulnerable escorts to worry about…er, no offense meant to the Confessor or Elderbug.”

“None taken,” the Elderbug said. Hornet looked up sharply; he’d roused from his slumber at some point during their conversation. He approached the fire with some difficulty.

“Are you well?” she asked.

“Sleeping rough is a trial for someone my age. But I persevere.”

“Whereas I am used to such conditions,” Jiji trilled, making them all jump. “Ah, did I startle you? Apologies.”

“Then it would appear we’re all well and truly roused,” Cornifer said, and went to where their rucksacks lay. “Breakfast, anyone? I might even be able to get some coffee going, while the fire lasts…”

He did, and it was execrable, but it woke them up as they chewed through a quick meal of hardtack and tiktik jerky. The dingy light of dawn crept into the cave. Shortly after they’d eaten, heavy footsteps approached, and Iselda’s spindly shadow appeared against that light, flanked by the far bulkier ones of the three brothers. They were all wearing packs of the approximate size and girth of their own torsos, but didn’t appear too bothered by the weight. Sheo hadn’t even removed his painter’s apron.

Cornifer went to greet his wife, and they exchanged some murmured pleasantries and a peck on the cheek before Iselda turned her attention to Hornet. She stood before the coals of the fire, shoulders squared, as if facing down an incoming avalanche.

“Sly’s ready for us,” Iselda said.

“I’ll see you off,” said Hornet.

“And what then?”

“One more trip to Dirtmouth. It seems appropriate.” Her voice and gaze both lowered. “And I’d like to pay respects to my family. There was scarce opportunity for it before.”

“You couldn’t do that on the road?”

“I’m not going with you. Cornifer’s told me of your objections to this decision, but I’m set in it.”

“I dearly hope that you’re not continuing this isolation out of some absurd sense of penance.” Iselda’s voice tightened by notches. “What happened to Hallownest was not your fault. I can’t countenance the thought of you setting out alone, after everything you’ve been though.”

“This isn’t a punishment,” said Hornet. “My mother told me once that, of all the things that may bind us, duty makes for a weak thread. But it was sufficient for me, until it unraveled. Now I need to reckon with where I stand. What I’ve become.” She ran her palm along the arc of her mask. “This pilgrimage will serve to tether me for now, maybe even help me to find my kin, but these years of isolation are not so easily shrugged aside. It would suffice for me to know that there are yet people out there who know I exist. So that I won’t be wholly forgotten, like so many others within these borders. I don’t need your protection, and I’m not prepared for your company, but if you could, then please think of me now and again. What little there was of me to remember.”

The last weak embers flickered across them. The brothers eyed each other warily; none of them were eager to insert themselves in this conversation. Iselda cast a hard stare in the cave’s corner, but when she spoke, her voice sounded on the verge of cracking.

“Have you reviewed that logbook I gave you?” she asked.

“Yes. It requires further study.”

“Then study it. Corny has the better sense of direction but I was always the survivalist of us two.” Cornifer shrugged and nodded. “Refer to those notes often and there should be little that will catch you unawares.”

“Is that all? My back aches,” Oro grunted. His brothers took a quick step away in case Iselda disemboweled him, but Hornet stepped forward instead, and reached into her cloak. The Elderbug and Jiji also drew near, heads tilted in curiosity.

“There is one other thing,” she said. “The borderland curse.”

“We’ve made our peace with it,” said Sheo.

“Be that as it may, we have no way of knowing if it still persists, or what its effects may be. It claims to strip the minds of all who leave the Pale King’s light. I should be fine, considering my heritage, but for the rest of you…”

She reached under her cloak, and what she withdrew made all of them take a step back. Even if they didn’t notice the faint halo that emitted from that smooth slice of chitin, no one could mistake that shape, the flared and tapering spike. The glow from the Pale King’s horn dimmed and brightened like a heartbeat.

“It would seem his light yet shines,” she said. “It may offer protection against the curse. If you’d like to take It along.”

No one moved. Hornet raised her head and looked around, shoulders slumping, seemingly bewildered. She turned in place, the horn held out almost beseechingly. The Elderbug was the one who finally approached, and she offered the horn to him – and then he shook his head, and gently pushed it away.

“I don’t understand,” said Hornet. Her voice held the merest hint of a quaver.

“I’ve lived here all my life,” said the Elderbug. “I don’t know what would be left of me if my memories of Hallownest were to be taken. But to carry a remnant of the Pale King…it doesn’t feel right. It pains me so, to leave this place. But I cannot hide beneath his aegis any longer.” He stroked the belljar underneath his cloak. “Who knows, perhaps my little relic will offer some protection of its own. It seemed so vibrant, when that last cataclysm struck.”

“There are people here that I could not forget even if I wanted to,” Oro said flatly.

“My brother’s tactlessness aside,” said Mato, “you’ve already done more for us than anyone could possibly expect, miss. You needn’t feel responsible for us any longer.”

“What is it our Master likes to say?” Sheo asked, and the other two heaved a sigh and answered in chorus:

_“Point your nail at the thing you seek.”_

Sheo beamed. “A fine lesson! You might not wield a nail per se, but it’s time to aim at your own horizons. Leave us to pursue the future that you provided.”

Hornet stared at the horn, its ebbing light. She was aware of how lost she looked, there in the middle of the cave.

“I’ve kept you long enough,” she said, and put the horn away.

“You’ll be keeping us a bit longer. Sly has words for you,” said Iselda. “But you’re right, let’s head out before our esteemed Nailmaster complains about his backpack again.”

Oro grumbled under his breath, but headed the group on their way out. The Elderbug softly touched Hornet as he passed and hobbled after Iselda and Cornifer. Soon it was just her and Jiji, who appeared in no hurry to move. Her eyes glinted in the inky dark behind her collar.

“Something you want to say?” Hornet asked her.

“Nothing that has not been said already.”

“Are there still stains upon me?”

“Oh, yes. Deep ones. They may well have changed your hue indelibly.”

“Is that right.” She went to grab her own bag. “I suppose a change was long overdue, for good or ill.”

“The truant-princess is wise.”

“Not a princess. Not anymore. Maybe not ever.”

“Maybe. And what will you be now?”

Hornet had no answer, and Jiji appeared content with that. They left the cave and emerged into the tarnished dawn, where the others awaited them.

The mountain pass that led to the wasteland’s edge was narrow and uneven, and they all kept a wary eye skyward in case one of the weakened cliff faces looked ready to give way. The brothers stayed up front, followed by Cornifer, with Iselda and Hornet protectively flanking the Elderbug and Jiji tottering in the back. They walked in silence, their packs rustling rhythmically, until Mato piped up.

“A thought occurs to me, Oro.”

“Does it now.”

“As you said, our burdens seem rather heavy.”

“Tiresome but reasonable. We’re the strongest of this lot.”

“Very true,” said Mato. “Though it does make you feel a bit like a pack-weevil.”

Oro squeezed his pack’s straps. “Mato…”

“And as I recall,” he continued, voice radiating angelic innocence, “you told Master in no uncertain terms that you would _not_ be his pack-”

“Mato, one more word and I shall cut you down where you stand, burden or no burden.”

“I missed this,” Sheo said happily.

They didn’t come to any mishap, through either avalanche or fratricide, and the tenor of the mountains’ howl shifted as they exited the pass and came to the wasteland’s edge, where discarded shells rose from the sands like tombstones and the half-buried husks of dead behemoths stared blindly towards the distant peaks. Sly’s greatnail was there, embedded point-down in the stone, and he stood atop it, facing the wastes. The Nailsmith was beside him, a long, thin varnished box held in both arms. They both turned as the group came closer. Sly looked to Hornet, then Iselda, and then he nodded.

“I assume we’ll be walking separate paths,” he said.

“Yes,” said Hornet.

He stole another glance behind him, his cloak twitching in the gritty breeze. “It won’t be an easy journey, in any case. The roads leading from here were always disused, and we’ll have to get used to time passing at its usual pace, without Hallownest’s influence.” He sighed. “If only the stag had abandoned those tunnels sooner. He would have been most appreciated during this trek, no matter how much he’d protested otherwise. But what’s done is done.”

Hornet said nothing to that. When she’d learned of the old stag’s fate, she’d at once recalled the way he’d tried to soothe her at their final meeting in the city below, and that had been the only time she’d once again come close to tears.

“I’ll be leaving this absurd thing behind.” Sly tapped the nail-hilt with his toe. “It’s too much weight, and we already have several capable warriors in this group.”

“Back to playing the merchant, then?” Hornet asked. The brothers broke away from the group and stood beside Sly.

“We cut ourselves into new shapes as the world requires. Though the old marks may linger, we are always capable of change. I wonder what roles you’ll step into.” He hopped off the nail and looked up at her, hands folded behind his back. “I expect to hear legends of them before long.”

“I wasn’t aware the Nailsage was such a flatterer.”

“My praise does not come cheaply, as my students will attest. A merchant knows the value of things. And if this is to be our parting, then it’s time you learned that this particular merchant is not so parsimonious as to repay all you’ve done with a few kind words and a wave of the hand. Nailsmith, if you would…?”

The Nailsmith stepped before Hornet, with that box at the ready. He knelt down, popped its hinges, and opened it with an oiled soundlessness, so that she could see what lay there.

It took a long moment for Hornet to grasp what she saw, even though this shape had been a constant companion of hers – at her side, on her back. The needle was nestled in red velvet not dissimilar from her own cloak, and the sheen of its metal was different from the one the Weavers had bequeathed her, a soft blue, like rainwater. She could distantly hear Sly continue to speak as she stared down at it.

“I availed myself of the opportunity to examine that weapon of yours when we first took you away from the Temple. An excellent piece, of a sort I’d never seen before. And after you awoke, and told us of the long vigil you held over this sorry land, I knew recompense was in order, and could think of no other possibility than this. The other warrior…that wonderfully deft-handed, white-masked bug…it pained me to learn they were beyond any reward. So I splurged a bit. The pale ore for this one’s make came from my own storehouse. I had no way of knowing that your original blade would come to such harm in the end, but I hope it makes this piece all the more attractive.”

“Will you take it?” the Nailsmith asked. His voice held neither expectation nor judgment.

Hornet reached into the box and withdrew the needle. It was subtly heavier than the one she had wielded for all those years, but well-balanced, the honing and fineness of its edge a near-exact duplicate. She swung it once, felt its heft shudder her arm.

“The Nailsage’s time with your own weapon was brief, but enough to provide me with the most exacting measurements,” said the Nailsmith, setting down the box. “Sheo was kind enough to assist with fine-tuning its balance and detail. There is yet room for improvement. My forge was taken by the calamity before I could finish the work. But if you so wish, you should find it an adequate replacement.”

“What you choose to do with it is entirely up to you, of course,” said Sly. “I’m sure the one you already bear holds deep significance. Consider that needle not to be a mere substitute, but a representation of the sentiments held for you by what remains of Hallownest. The pride of its artisans, the skill of its warriors…and the gratitude of its people.”

As one, Sly, the Nailsmith, and the three brothers all bowed. Hornet remained there, the wind muttering around her. She carefully placed the needle back in its case and stood it up beside her. The remaining travelers passed by her and joined Sly and the others, their bags at the ready. Though only a mere few paces existed between her and them, that gap now seemed wide as the distance between the Blue Lake’s shores. Hornet swallowed, made herself speak.

“You have my thanks,” she said. “For this gift, and the aid you provided after the infection’s banishment. You’ve all accepted my reasons for venturing forth on my own, so I won’t reiterate them here, but do not allow concerns about my safety to hinder your own journey. As Hallownest’s protector, I wish you all the best of-”

“Oh, for pity’s sake,” Iselda sighed, and then walked forward and bent low and hugged Hornet tight. Hornet made a kind of squeaking noise, arms stiff at her sides, but a second later hesitantly returned the embrace. Iselda was warm in her arms, her breath warm in Hornet’s ear.

“We’ll meet again, understand?” she said. “And don’t think you’ll get away so easily next time.”

It was several seconds before Hornet understood that Iselda wouldn’t let go until she did, and so she stayed that way a little while longer, eyes shut, remembering the sensation of those claws lightly digging into her back. When she finally lowered her arms, Iselda gave one final lingering caress to the side of her mask, and then turned to rejoin the others.

“Goodbye,” Hornet said.

The sun, fully risen now, strained its light through the thick clouds. The travelers headed out slowly, with attention paid as before to Jiji and the Elderbug. Several of them turned and waved one final time before they passed the heaps of half-buried husks, and Hornet watched them, unblinking. At no point did they show any sign of succumbing to the borderland curse – no hitch in their step or sudden bewildered twists of the head as the memory of where and who they’d been was scoured from their minds. Their outlines became fuzzed by the shifting sands and Hornet wondered where, if ever, the curse was actually meant to take hold, if it was gradual or intended to strike all at once upon crossing some secondary and yet-unseen border. For a time she imagined what might become of them, if their minds would be affected, if their bodies should be savaged by predatory beasts lying in wait, if they should run short of food or water before entering more favorable climes, a score of potential disasters that could befall this ragged group, but at last she blinded herself to all of these possibilities, and turned away.

She was, in the end, her father’s daughter.

* * *

At the gates of Dirtmouth, a small heap of earth had been broken and reshaped into an oblong mound. Atop this pile rested a stone sculpture small enough to fit in the palm of one’s hand, chiseled in the rough likeness of a stag. As she’d recuperated, Hornet had watched this little model take shape under Sheo’s chisel, and he’d shyly withdrawn another from his apron of a diminutive bug with arched horns and black-hewn eyes. He’d promised to carry her story to whatever world lay outside this one. The ghost’s own tale would not be forgotten.

For everything else, there was this.

The pit formed by the collapsing kingdom had devoured all but Dirtmouth’s very outer periphery, the sagging huts and shattered lampposts now among the flotsam deep below; the stag, too, had fallen in, having briefly escaped Hallownest only to rejoin it once more. On its far side, the sigils which had eaten the Crystal Peak from the inside out and persisted even after its collapse had been extinguished by the Pale King’s death, but the mountain had been reduced to a crumpled clod of raised stone, taken almost wholly by the decay. It was possible to see the gray horizons past its slumped shape. The wind blew over the pit, producing a constant low dolorous note.

Hornet knelt at its edge, her artifacts laid out before her. The two nails were closest, both the stubby pure nail and the half-melted remains of the Dream Nail’s hilt, and above them were the horns, the father’s flanked by his two children. The sun continued its slow pace as she stared at these scattered fragments, and tried to remember – the brief glimpses she had caught of her family, the long-frayed childhood spent with her mother and Midwife and the Weavers already gone, the sleeping beauty of Hallownest that she had endured like an affliction as she’d cleansed it of the dreaming dead. The White Lady abandoned to her confinement and the Mask Masker to his labor, the mad merchants and nobles and these dusty corners and scattered relics and shrines to departed gods. All these things now existed, could only exist, whole and unblemished in her mind. The little ghost may have touched enough lives to persist in the ones who now journeyed outside Hallownest, assuming the curse did not take hold, but all the rest was for her. She felt its weight upon her back. She thought it might be heavy enough to break her through this unsteady ground and cast her back in with the kingdom’s refuse, never again to rise.

She recalled Rhea’s words, during her confrontation in that black-sculpted madhouse of a cavern she had carved. The burden of grievers. To always remember the dead and the collapsed, to build a shrine of memory for them and carry it forever in one’s mind. And what had become of Rhea herself, following that doctrine? Twisted into a self-mutilating wretch scuttling through the husk of her home again and again, tormented and exalted by her recollections of all that had gone and would never return, supping so often on grief’s venom that, even had she anticipated the catastrophic result of her rituals, probably would have disregarded it nonetheless. She had sought eternal stasis, but in every practical sense, Rhea of the Black Seventeen had died a long, long time ago. Nobody was meant to grieve an epoch, a civilization. Not even a god’s mind could encompass it all.

But Hornet was all they had left.

Her father’s horn still emitted its shine. She felt the need to ask it for something – approval, understanding. But she held her tongue. The dead could not hear.

She rose and gathered the relics in her arms, pressed them to her chest. The horns’ edges dug through the fabric of her cloak and into the shell beneath but she accepted the pain, endured it for as long as she could, and then cast all of them into the pit. Metal and chitin alike twinkled and spun, and she peered over the edge and watched the murk consume them.

Hands shaking now, she unslung her needle. She held it out. Her face was dimly reflected in its cracked surface, all its outlines reduced to fog. She pressed the cool metal to her forehead as though the needle would become a membrane through which she could burst and emerge into the older days, when the Weavers’ webs still shimmered and her mother’s fierce, hesitant love still guided her like a lodestone, and her breath hitched and broke and with one final cry she spun the needle around and reared back and threw it skyward. It flew like it meant to pierce the clouds, the noontime light winking off its edge, but it faltered, and fell point-down, arrowing into the rotted fathoms.

* * *

The needle sank quick and deep into the waters that had swallowed the City of Tears, cutting its way through the blue. It passed floating blank-eyed bodies, and chunks of sculpture rendered anonymous by their shattering, and, relics suspended as if sealed in amber, and came to rest with its point embedded between two slabs of stone, yet upright. The water continued to drain, through the collapsed sewers and the numerous new cracks opened up by the kingdom’s destruction, all the way to the very lowest reaches, a darkness that no light, mourning or otherwise, would reach; the current from that draining guided its flotsam downward, but the needle stayed resolute, unmoving. It was possible to imagine it still there, should the day ever come when the Abyss swallowed everything that Hallownest had to offer – a memorial yet untouched, the only weapon of its kind that this place had ever seen or would see again.

The horns, lightweight as they were, drifted easily, guided by the currents’ plucking. They passed through clumps of wood and bramble, nimbly dodged the fingers of drowned hands splayed like chitinous anemone.

Grit crunched beneath Hornet’s feet as she walked, her rucksack’s weight resting uneasy. Across the bag was strapped a needle of an unfamiliar hue, and she saw its shadow intersecting her own and found its shape comforting. The blind eyes of desiccated borderland husks loomed over her as she crossed the border, and went further, the wind’s elegy playing at her back.

Somewhere was distant Pharloom. Somewhere was a cage of golden lace, a choir raised in murderous harmony, engines turning eternally deep within the molten earth, warriors driven to madness by the promises of whispering mist. Somewhere was the promise of her kin, insubstantial as silk, but enough to carry her forward. The horns of her family continued their descent to that black and bottomless sea which desired nothing and accepted all it was given, and Hornet traveled west, bound for haunted lands anew.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Thank you for reading.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-KFYqCHZ7A)

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Yours to Inherit](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27049579) by [McAlli](https://archiveofourown.org/users/McAlli/pseuds/McAlli)




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